The present Symposium aims at challenging some received views about the meaning and legacy of Rorty’s ethical and political philosophy, as well as at furthering new interpretations and reworkings of his writings on such topics.
Introduction to the Symposium on Richard Rorty's Moral and Political Philosophy I have edited.
The issue of the advantage or rather dangerousness of redescriptive activities motivated Rorty’s landmark private/public divide, and yet, upon closer inspection, the divide itself needs to be rethought precisely in the light of the possibility that the ironist attitude can jeopardize the quest for public solidarity by frustrating one’s fellow beings in their tentative activities of identities-formation.
In the paper I examine Rorty’s argument elaborated in Philosophy and Social Hope where he places himself within the liberal democratic tradition stemming from Mill and Dewey. Rorty argues that this tradition does not need to be revised, it only needs to be supplemented by what we have learnt from contemporary post-modern critics such as Foucault. I argue on the contrary that Rorty’s project of freeing liberal democracy from foundations – a task which he places within the private concerns of the liberal ironist – requires him to revise the tradition.
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