Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty » (1)

Richard Rorty is Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He is the author of three volumes of Philosophical Papers (1991-1998), and Philosophy and Social Hope (1999). Eduardo Mendieta is Associate Professor of Philosophy at SUNY, Stony Brook. He is the author of Adventures of Transcendental Philosophy: Karl-Otto Apel’s Semiotics and Discourse Ethics (2002).

This volume collects a number of important and revealing interviews with Richard Rorty, spanning more than two decades of his public intellectual commentary, engagement, and criticism.

Library Journal

In 1979, Rorty (humanities, Univ. of Virginia) shocked the members of the philosophical academy by exposing them as emperors without clothes, pointing out the bankruptcy of their epistemological systems and calling for an end to philosophy as it was being practiced. His Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature issued a clarion call to philosophers to think of philosophy not as a set of metaphysical propositions verified by language, but as a series of edifying discourses. Rorty later turned to writers like Vladimir Nabokov and Milan Kundera, whose work, he believed, offered an entry into philosophical thinking about culture. He also took his notions of philosophers as "conversation partners" into politics and religion as he tried to recover both the pragmatism of John Dewey and the liberalism of Irving Howe for our times. The interviews collected here, which span more than two decades, follow these trajectories. With an introduction by Mendieta (philosophy, SUNY at Stony Brook), they range in topic from literature, politics, and postmetaphysical philosophy to democracy and pragmatism. Most have been previously published. While all present Rorty as an outspoken thinker and our preeminent philosopher, they reveal little that we don't already know. Recommended for academic libraries only.-Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Lancaster, PA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.