Rorty and Beyond

Randall Auxier is professor of philosophy and communication studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and a regular visiting professor in the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Warsaw. Eli Kramer is assistant professor of philosophy of culture at the Institute of Philosophy, University of Warsaw. Krzysztof (Chris) Piotr Skowroński, PhD, teaches contemporary philosophy, rhetoric and persuasion, and multiculturalism at the University of Opole, Poland.

Contents
Preface
Randall Auxier
Introduction: Richard Rorty as a Transitional Genre
Eli Kramer
Part 1: Take Care of the Future and the Past Will Take Care of Itself
1. “Bad Boy of Philosophy”: Richard Rorty, Provocateur
Crispin Sartwell
2. “Nine Chances Out of Ten that Things Will Go to Hell”: Rorty on Orwell, Silko, and Narratives of the Dark Future
Wojciech Małecki
3. Only a God Can Save Us: Richard Rorty’s Philosophy of Social Hope Beyond Secularism
Roman Madzia

Part 2: Method and Madness
4. Naturalistic Axiology and Normativity in Rorty
Krzysztof Piotr Skowroński
5. The Tenuous Harmony of Imagination, Vision, and Critique
Brendan Hogan
6. Abandoning Truth is Not a Solution: A Discussion with Richard Rorty
Marcin Kilanowski

Part 3: Democracy and Its Discontents
7. —Not NeoPragmatism but Critical Pragmatism: There Are Times When the Private Must Become Public
Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley
8. The Problem of Ethnocentrism: An Attempt to Save Rorty’s Pragmatism from Itself
John Ryder
9. We Liberal, Ironic Hypocrites: Situating Rorty in the History of American Democratic Thought
Kenneth W. Stikkers
10. Solidarity, Imagination, and Richard Rorty’s Unfulfilled Democratic Possibilities: A Deweyan Reconstruction
Justin Bell

Part 4: Nature, Knowing, and Naturalisms
11. Vocabularies and the Life-World: A Criticism of Rorty’s Naturalism
Roberto Gronda
12. The Solomonic Strategy: The Brain as Hardware, Culture as Software: Re-reading Rorty’s Criticism of Cognitive Science
Maja Niestrój

Part 5: Representations and Other Mirrors
13. Why We Should Move from Rorty to “Rortwey”
Radim Šíp
14. Reconsidering Rorty’s Theory of Vocabularies: On the Role and Scope of Persuasion in a Post-Representationalist Culture
Miklós Nyírő
15. The Lamp of Reason and the Mirror of Nature
Preston Stovall

Part 6: Logic, Truth, and Progress
16. Logic Beyond the Looking Glass
David Beisecker
17. Reality is More Practical than Truth: Rorty on Truth vs. Justification
John Shook
18. Ironic Wrongdoing and the Arc of the Universe
Randall Auxier
Index
About the Editors
About the Contributors