Introduction to International Symposium on Richard Rorty

Abstract

This issue of Contemporary Pragmatism is devoted to reassessing the figure of Richard Rorly, as an intellectual and a person, on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of lus death. In May 2013 in Buenos Aires a diverse group of scholars came together for a symposium organized by Graduate Program of Philosophy and the History of Science at the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero (UNTREF), which we had the honor to coordinate, along with Michael Williams, the invaluable help of Cesar Lorenzano and Veronica Tozzi, and the support of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy (SAAP).The symposium was an opportunity to honor the memory of the author of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature in the presence of former students, friends, colleagues, and scholars of lus work, from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Norway, Pera, Poland, Slovakia, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S. In a spirit that himself would have appreciated, also paramount was a critical engagement with his work and its importance both within and outside philosophy for nearly 50 years. This issue contains some of the contributions presented at the symposium and evidences the ongoing relevance of Rortian ideas and texts for a wide range of philosophical areas, including epistemology, political philosophy, etlucs, philosophy of language, aesthetics, and philosophy of science, to name only a few. Rorty continues as a great heir of classical pragmatist tradition and its philosophical spirit of not being tied to fashion or committed to excessive specialization.The articles that follow aie organized into two sections, one directed toward epistemological issues, and one attuned to topics of practical philosophy, with emphasis on political philosophy, ethics, philosophy of history and the links between literary and philosophical activity. What follows is a brief outline of the articles.The first section opens with Richard J. Bernstein's, 'So Much the Worse for your Old Intuitions, Start Working up Some New Ones', the newest entry in the senes of theoretical interventions that the author of Beyond Relativism and Objectivism has been developing since at least the 1980's on the work of Ins friend and former colleague at Yale. Tins time, Bernstein focuses on Rorty's critique of the foundational role of intuitions, as pre-linguistic entities that serve as epistemological givens and as basic beliefs that allow for resolving philosophical disagreement. Bernstein deploys Ins analysis of these ciitical arguments and resumes Ins interrogation of Rortian antirepresentationalism, which claims a needless all or nothing choice between two conceptions of rationality, an algorithmic one and an incommensurabilitist one.In Roity and Dewey on Warrant, Angel Faema traces similarities and differences between the thought of and John Dewey, whose work was always considered by the author of Contingency, Irony Solidarity as an essential background of Iris project but with whom he also remained in disagreement on some specific insights. The text stresses the Rortian ambivalence with Dewey, but also emphasizes the nodal points of coincidence that both philosophers have about the concept of epistemological warrant. Faema's dialectical strategy is to bring both philosophers together through a questioning of Robert Brandom's criticisms of classic pragmatism.In How to Be a Pragmatist Without Surrendering to Naturalism, Eleonora Cresto presents the various ways in which Rorty is assumed to be a naturalist and draws attention to the possibility of reaching, from Darwinian premises, an uncritical form of naturalism that embodies serious difficulties for an account of the phenomenon of rationality from a first person point of view. Consequently, she defends the idea that there is a sense in which it is true that reason cannot be naturalized, and that it can be deployed from a pragmatist perspective perfectly compatible with Rortian antirepresentationalism. …