- Table View
- List View
Rhetorical Spaces: Essays on Gendered Locations
by Lorraine CodeThe arguments in this book are informed at once by the moral-political implications of how knowledge is produced and circulated and by issues of gendered subjectivity. In their critical dimension, these lucid essays engage with the incapacity of the philosophical mainstream's dominant epistemologies to offer regulative principles that guide people in the epistemic projects that figure centrally in their lives. In its constructive dimension, Rhetorical Spaces focuses on developing productive, case-by-case analyses of knowing other people in situations where social-political inequalities create asymmetrical patterns of epistemic power and privilege.
Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue: Capitalism and Civil Society in the British Enlightenment (RSA Series in Transdisciplinary Rhetoric #2)
by Mark Garrett LongakerDuring the British Enlightenment, the correlation between effective communication and moral excellence was undisputed—so much so that rhetoric was taught as a means of instilling desirable values in students. In Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue, Mark Garrett Longaker explores the connections between rhetoric and ethics in the context of the history of capitalism. Longaker’s study lingers on four British intellectuals from the late seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century: philosopher John Locke, political economist Adam Smith, rhetorical theorist Hugh Blair, and sociologist Herbert Spencer. Across one hundred and fifty years, these influential men sought to mold British students into good bourgeois citizens by teaching them the discursive habits of clarity, sincerity, moderation, and economy, all with one incontrovertible truth in mind: the free market requires virtuous participants in order to thrive. Through these four case studies—written as biographically focused yet socially attentive intellectual histories—Longaker portrays the British rhetorical tradition as beholden to the dual masters of ethics and economics, and he sheds new light on the deliberate intellectual engineering implicit in Enlightenment pedagogy.
Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue: Capitalism and Civil Society in the British Enlightenment (RSA Series in Transdisciplinary Rhetoric)
by Mark Garrett LongakerDuring the British Enlightenment, the correlation between effective communication and moral excellence was undisputed—so much so that rhetoric was taught as a means of instilling desirable values in students. In Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue, Mark Garrett Longaker explores the connections between rhetoric and ethics in the context of the history of capitalism. Longaker’s study lingers on four British intellectuals from the late seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century: philosopher John Locke, political economist Adam Smith, rhetorical theorist Hugh Blair, and sociologist Herbert Spencer. Across one hundred and fifty years, these influential men sought to mold British students into good bourgeois citizens by teaching them the discursive habits of clarity, sincerity, moderation, and economy, all with one incontrovertible truth in mind: the free market requires virtuous participants in order to thrive. Through these four case studies—written as biographically focused yet socially attentive intellectual histories—Longaker portrays the British rhetorical tradition as beholden to the dual masters of ethics and economics, and he sheds new light on the deliberate intellectual engineering implicit in Enlightenment pedagogy.
Rhetorical Ways of Thinking
by Lillie R. Albert Danielle Corea Vittoria MacadinoRhetorical Ways of Thinking focuses on how the co-construction of learning models the interpretation of a mathematical situation. It is a comprehensive examination of the role of sociocultural-historical theory developed by Vygotsky. This book puts forward the supposition that the major assumptions of sociocultural-historic theory are essential to understanding the theory's application to mathematical pedagogy, which explores issues relevant to learning and teaching mathematics-in-context, thus providing a valuable practical tool for general mathematics education research. The most important goal, then, is to exemplify the merging of the theory with practice and the subsequent applications to mathematics teaching and learning. This monograph contains five chapters, including a primer to Vygotsky's sociocultural historic theory, three comprehensive empirical studies examining: prospective teachers' perception of mathematics teaching and learning and the practice of scaffolded instruction to assist practicing teachers in developing their understanding of pedagogical content knowledge. Finally, the book concludes with a contextualization of the theory, linking it to best practices in the classroom.
Rhetoric’s Pragmatism: Essays in Rhetorical Hermeneutics (RSA Series in Transdisciplinary Rhetoric #4)
by Steven MaillouxFor over thirty years, Steven Mailloux has championed and advanced the field of rhetorical hermeneutics, a historically and theoretically informed approach to textual interpretation. This volume collects fourteen of his most recent influential essays on the methodology, plus an interview.Following from the proposition that rhetorical hermeneutics uses rhetoric to practice theory by doing history, this book examines a diverse range of texts from literature, history, law, religion, and cultural studies. Through four sections, Mailloux explores the theoretical writings of Heidegger, Burke, and Rorty, among others; Jesuit educational treatises; and products of popular culture such as Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran and Star Trek: The Next Generation. In doing so, he shows how rhetorical perspectives and pragmatist traditions work together as two mutually supportive modes of understanding, and he demonstrates how the combination of rhetoric and interpretation works both in theory and in practice. Theoretically, rhetorical hermeneutics can be understood as a form of neopragmatism. Practically, it focuses on the production, circulation, and reception of written and performed communication. A thought-provoking collection from a preeminent literary critic and rhetorician, Rhetoric’s Pragmatism assesses the practice and value of rhetorical hermeneutics today and the directions in which it might head. Scholars and students of rhetoric and communication studies, critical theory, literature, law, religion, and American studies will find Mailloux’s arguments enlightening and essential.
Rhetoric’s Pragmatism: Essays in Rhetorical Hermeneutics (RSA Series in Transdisciplinary Rhetoric)
by Steven MaillouxFor over thirty years, Steven Mailloux has championed and advanced the field of rhetorical hermeneutics, a historically and theoretically informed approach to textual interpretation. This volume collects fourteen of his most recent influential essays on the methodology, plus an interview.Following from the proposition that rhetorical hermeneutics uses rhetoric to practice theory by doing history, this book examines a diverse range of texts from literature, history, law, religion, and cultural studies. Through four sections, Mailloux explores the theoretical writings of Heidegger, Burke, and Rorty, among others; Jesuit educational treatises; and products of popular culture such as Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran and Star Trek: The Next Generation. In doing so, he shows how rhetorical perspectives and pragmatist traditions work together as two mutually supportive modes of understanding, and he demonstrates how the combination of rhetoric and interpretation works both in theory and in practice. Theoretically, rhetorical hermeneutics can be understood as a form of neopragmatism. Practically, it focuses on the production, circulation, and reception of written and performed communication.A thought-provoking collection from a preeminent literary critic and rhetorician, Rhetoric’s Pragmatism assesses the practice and value of rhetorical hermeneutics today and the directions in which it might head. Scholars and students of rhetoric and communication studies, critical theory, literature, law, religion, and American studies will find Mailloux’s arguments enlightening and essential.
Rhetoriken des Digitalen: Adressierungen an die Pädagogik
by Miguel Zulaica y Mugica Klaus-Christian ZehbeDer Band nähert sich dem Thema ‚Digitalisierung’ problembeschreibend und sucht einen multiperspektivischen Zugang zu dem komplexen Forschungsfeld. Transformations- und Umbruchsrhetoriken bestimmen die Diskurse um Digitalisierung und formulieren immer politisch-gesellschaftliche Handlungsaufforderungen an Wissenschaft und Praxis. ‚Die Pädagogik‘ wird in diesem Feld als Vermittlerin adressiert, die Digitalisierung begleiten und mitgestalten soll. In den Beiträgen des Bandes wird der Frage nachgegangen wie eine reflektierte Perspektive zu diesen scheinbar alternativlosen Adressierungen gewonnen werden kann.
The Rhizome and the Flower: The Perennial Philosophy—Yeats and Jung
by James OlneyThis title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1980.
Rhythm: New Trajectories in Law (New Trajectories in Law)
by Conor HeaneyThis book analyses the conceptual and concrete relationships between rhythm and law. Rhythm is the unfolding of ordered and regulated movement. Law operates through the ordering and regulation of movement. Adopting a ‘rhythmanalytical’ perspective – which treats natural and social phenomena in terms of their rhythms, repetitions, motions, and movements – this book offers an account of how legal institutions and practices can be theorised and explained in terms of rhythm. It demonstrates how the category of rhythm has jurisprudential significance, from how Plato envisaged the functioning of the city-state, to the operation of the common law, as well as in our relationship to contemporary digital technology. In music, rhythm ‘orders’ the movement of sound, binding together the motions and vibrations of sound in such a way that is neither pure noise nor pure mechanics. In this way, rhythm can be deployed as a concept in the analysis of one of the central purposes of legal institutions and practices: to order the movements of bodies, whether the bodies of citizens in everyday life or of prisoners in rituals of punishment. This book engages with the mutual intersections and points of illumination between rhythm and law, such as ritual, measure, order, and change. This book is an experimental rhythmanalysis of law, offering conceptual and methodological starting points, as well as proposing directions that could be deployed in future research. It is aimed primarily at legal scholars intrigued by rhythmanalysis and rhythmanalysts more generally. This book will also be of interest to those in the fields of philosophy, political and legal theory, sociology, and other social sciences.
The Rhythm of Thought: Art, Literature, and Music after Merleau-Ponty
by Jessica WiskusBetween present and past, visible and invisible, and sensation and idea, there is resonance--so philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued and so Jessica Wiskus explores in The Rhythm of Thought. Holding the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, the paintings of Paul Cézanne, the prose of Marcel Proust, and the music of Claude Debussy under Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological light, she offers innovative interpretations of some of these artists' masterworks, in turn articulating a new perspective on Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. More than merely recovering Merleau-Ponty's thought, Wiskus thinks according to it. First examining these artists in relation to noncoincidence--as silence in poetry, depth in painting, memory in literature, and rhythm in music--she moves through an array of their artworks toward some of Merleau-Ponty's most exciting themes: our bodily relationship to the world and the dynamic process of expression. She closes with an examination of synesthesia as an intertwining of internal and external realms and a call, finally, for philosophical inquiry as a mode of artistic expression. Structured like a piece of music itself, The Rhythm of Thought offers new contexts in which to approach art, philosophy, and the resonance between them.
The Rhythm of Thought: Art, Literature, and Music after Merleau-Ponty
by Jessica WiskusBetween present and past, visible and invisible, and sensation and idea, there is resonance—so philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued and so Jessica Wiskus explores in The Rhythm of Thought. Holding the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, the paintings of Paul Cézanne, the prose of Marcel Proust, and the music of Claude Debussy under Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological light, she offers innovative interpretations of some of these artists’ masterworks, in turn articulating a new perspective on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. More than merely recovering Merleau-Ponty’s thought, Wiskus thinks according to it. First examining these artists in relation to noncoincidence—as silence in poetry, depth in painting, memory in literature, and rhythm in music—she moves through an array of their artworks toward some of Merleau-Ponty’s most exciting themes: our bodily relationship to the world and the dynamic process of expression. She closes with an examination of synesthesia as an intertwining of internal and external realms and a call, finally, for philosophical inquiry as a mode of artistic expression. Structured like a piece of music itself, The Rhythm of Thought offers new contexts in which to approach art, philosophy, and the resonance between them.
Ribbon of Darkness: Inferencing from the Shadowy Arts and Sciences
by Barbara Maria StaffordOver the course of her career, Barbara Stafford has established herself the preeminent scholar of the intersections of the arts and sciences, articulating new theories and methods for understanding the sublime, the mysterious, the inscrutable. Omnivorous in her research, she has published work that embraces neuroscience and philosophy, biology and culture, pinpointing connections among each discipline’s parallel concerns. Ribbon of Darkness is a monument to the scope of her work and the range of her intellect. At times associative, but always incisive, the essays in this new volume take on a distinctly contemporary purpose: to uncover the ethical force and moral aspects of overlapping scientific and creative inquiries. This shared territory, Stafford argues, offers important insights into—and clarifications of—current dilemmas about personhood, the supposedly menial nature of manual skill, the questionable borderlands of gene editing, the potentially refining value of dualism, and the limits of a materialist worldview. Stafford organizes these essays around three concepts that structure the book: inscrutability, ineffability, and intuitability. All three, she explains, allow us to examine how both the arts and the sciences imaginatively infer meaning from the “veiled behavior of matter,” bringing these historically divided subjects into a shared intellectual inquiry and imbuing them with an ethical urgency. A vanguard work at the intersection of the arts and sciences, this book will be sure to guide readers from either realm into unfamiliar yet undeniably fertile territory.
Rice Biofortification: Lessons for Global Science and Development
by Sally BrooksBiofortification - the enrichment of staple food crops with essential micronutrients - has been heralded as a uniquely sustainable solution to the problem of micronutrient deficiency or 'hidden hunger'. Considerable attention and resources are being directed towards the biofortification of rice - the world's most important food crop. Through an in-depth analysis of international rice biofortification efforts across the US, Philippines and China, this book provides an important critique of such goal-oriented, top-down approaches. These approaches, the author argues, exemplify a model of global, 'public goods' science that is emerging within complex, international research networks. It provides vital lessons for those researching and making decisions about science and research policy, showing that if this model becomes entrenched, it is likely to channel resources towards the search for 'silver bullet' solutions at the expense of more incremental approaches that respond to locality, diversity and the complex and uncertain interactions between people and their environments. The author proposes a series of key changes to institutions and practices that might allow more context-responsive alternatives to emerge. These issues are particularly important now as increasing concerns over food security are leading donors and policy makers to commit to ambitious visions of 'impact at scale' - visions which may never become a reality and may preclude more effective pathways from being pursued. Published in association with the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)
The Rice Seedling Sutra: Buddha's Teachings on Dependent Arising
by Yeshe ThabkheOne of Tibet&’s great scholars presents the Buddha&’s profound teachings on the laws of karma and dependent arising.In the Rice Seedling Sutra, the Buddha unpacks the law of cause and effect. He notes how in the natural world, a seed becomes a sprout, which produces a flower, which bears fruit. A seed has no intention to sprout; when the right conditions are assembled the fruit arises. Similarly, when our senses encounter an object, a sense consciousness arises naturally, without our intending it. This, says the Buddha, is also how karma works and how actions performed out of ignorance create suffering, whether we want it or not. And this same law of causality also governs enlightenment—when the right conditions are assembled, awakening is assured. In many sutras like this one, the Buddha explains that to understand his Dharma is to understand dependent arising. Geshe Yeshe Thabkhe explores dependent arising, and the corollary teaching of emptiness, through this sutra and others. Commenting on the works of Indian masters such as Shantaraksita, he shows how belief in a creator god is incompatible with dependent arising, and by illuminating the teachings of Nagarjuna and Chandrakirti, he shows how we do—and do not—exist. Geshe Yeshe Thabkhe was among the last generation of scholars to be trained in Tibet before the Chinese occupation. He has been teaching Westerners for decades, having worked with top scholars in the United States, and he is especially familiar with this sutra, having translated the commentary by Kamalasila into Hindi. Here his deep familiarity, combined with his extensive command of the Buddhist scriptures, allows him to present the Buddha&’s words in a rich and authoritative context.
The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto
by Tavis Smiley Cornel WestRecord unemployment and rampant corporate avarice, empty houses but homeless families, dwindling opportunities in an increasingly paralyzed nation—these are the realities of 21st-century America, land of the free and home of the new middle class poor. Award-winning broadcaster Tavis Smiley and Dr. Cornel West, one of the nation’s leading democratic intellectuals, co-hosts of Public Radio’s Smiley & West, now take on the "P" word—poverty.The Rich and the Rest of Us is the next step in the journey that began with "The Poverty Tour: A Call to Conscience." Smiley and West’s 18-city bus tour gave voice to the plight of impoverished Americans of all races, colors, and creeds. With 150 million Americans persistently poor or near poor, the highest numbers in over five decades, Smiley and West argue that now is the time to confront the underlying conditions of systemic poverty in America before it’s too late.By placing the eradication of poverty in the context of the nation’s greatest moments of social transformation— such as the abolition of slavery, woman’s suffrage, and the labor and civil rights movements—ending poverty is sure to emerge as America’s 21st‑century civil rights struggle.As the middle class disappears and the safety net is shredded, Smiley and West, building on the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., ask us to confront our fear and complacency with 12 poverty changing ideas. They challenge us to re-examine our assumptions about poverty in America—what it really is and how to eliminate it now.
Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight
by Jeanette KeithDuring World War I, thousands of rural southern men, black and white, refused to serve in the military. Some failed to register for the draft, while others deserted after being inducted. In the countryside, armed bands of deserters defied local authorities; capturing them required the dispatch of federal troops into three southern states.Jeanette Keith traces southern draft resistance to several sources, including whites' long-term political opposition to militarism, southern blacks' reluctance to serve a nation that refused to respect their rights, the peace witness of southern churches, and, above all, anger at class bias in federal conscription policies. Keith shows how draft dodgers' success in avoiding service resulted from the failure of southern states to create effective mechanisms for identifying and classifying individuals. Lacking local-level data on draft evaders, the federal government used agencies of surveillance both to find reluctant conscripts and to squelch antiwar dissent in rural areas.Drawing upon rarely used local draft board reports, Selective Service archives, Bureau of Investigation reports, and southern political leaders' constituent files, Keith offers new insights into rural southern politics and society as well as the growing power of the nation-state in early twentieth-century America.
Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America
by Garrett NeimanWith a foreword by New York Times bestselling author Robin DiAngelo, this provocative book investigates major corporate boardrooms and presents a data-driven analysis of how rich white men have preserved their monopoly on power—and what we can do to stop them. It&’s no secret that our country has a serious problem when it comes to wealth inequality – and systemic racism and patriarchy have only exacerbated the advantages of wealthy white men. Over the past three decades, America&’s richest white men have only become richer, while those suffering in poverty have only gotten poorer. The divide may seem too great to bridge, but Rich White Men exposes the hidden and insidious ways that white male elites inherit, increase, and preserve their status—and, in this book, we get clear on how to uproot their monopoly on power. Serial nonprofit entrepreneur Garrett Neiman&’s day job is to get rich white men to donate money to good causes and organizations. In Rich White Men, Neiman brings us into corner offices of billionaires and the boardrooms of Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, Stanford, Harvard, and other enclaves of silver-spooned white men to illuminate the role of rich white men in the world and how they justify inequality. He uses the analogy of compound interest to illustrate how the advantages wealthy white men inherit give them a leg up at key moments in their lives, gilding their trajectories and shutting others out. Through this rare, insider access, readers will discover new ways to persuade the elite toward progressive solutions. A hopeful polemic, the book sheds light on dark truths about inequality and the people invested in preserving it while also providing a blueprint for how America can become an equitable democracy.Rich White Men reveals that to realize America&’s founding aspiration of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we must recognize, dismantle, and transform our current system into one that liberates us all – including this nation&’s morally and spiritually impoverished wealthy white men.
Richard Congreve, Positivist Politics, the Victorian Press, and the British Empire
by Matthew WilsonThis book is about the life and times of Richard Congreve. This polemicist was the first thinker to gain instant infamy for publishing cogent critiques of imperialism in Victorian Britain. As the foremost British acolyte of Auguste Comte, Congreve sought to employ the philosopher’s new science of sociology to dismantle the British Empire. With an aim to realise in its place Comte’s global vision of utopian socialist republican city-states, the former Oxford don and ex-Anglican minister launched his Church of Humanity in 1859. Over the next forty years, Congreve engaged in some of the most pressing foreign and domestic controversies of his day, despite facing fierce personal attacks in the Victorian press. Congreve made overlooked contributions to the history of science, political economy, and secular ethics. In this book Matthew Wilson argues that Congreve’s polemics, ‘in the name of Humanity’, served as the devotional practices of his Positivist church.
Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist
by W.J. Torrance KirbyThis book explores key aspects of Richard Hooker's philosophical and theological discourse in the context of currents of thought prevalent in the 'Magisterial Reformation' of the sixteenth century. Hooker's treatment of natural law, his dependence upon the philosophical discourse and traditional cosmology of Christian Neoplatonism, and his appeal to the authority of patristic sources, are all closely examined. Challenging the received 'exceptionalist' model of much of the twentieth-century interpretation of Hooker, in particular the concept of his supposed defence of the English Reformation as striking a 'via media' between Rome and mainstream Protestant reform, W.J. Torrance Kirby argues that Hooker adheres to principles of 'magisterial' reform while building upon the assumptions of a distinctively Protestant version of Platonism.
Richard Kearney’s Anatheistic Wager: Philosophy, Theology, Poetics (Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion)
by Chris Doude van Troostwijk Matthew ClementePhilosopher Blaise Pascal famously insisted that it was better to wager belief in God than to risk eternal damnation. More recently, Richard Kearney has offered a wager of his own--the anatheistic wager, or return to God after the death of God. In this volume, an international group of contributors consider what Kearney's spiritual wager means. They question what is at stake with such a wager and what anatheism demands of the self and of others. The essays explore the dynamics of religious anatheistic performativity, its demarcations and limits, and its motives. A recent interview with Kearney focuses on crucial questions about philosophy, theology, and religious commitment. As a whole, this volume interprets and challenges Kearney's philosophy of religion and its radical impact on contemporary views of God.
Richard Ned Lebow: A Pioneer in International Relations Theory, History, Political Philosophy and Psychology
by Richard Ned LebowThis is the first of four volumes to be published as part of this book series, on the life and work of Richard Ned Lebow. In a career spanning six decades, Richard Ned Lebow has made important contributions to the study of international relations, political and intellectual history, motivational and social psychology, philosophy of science, and classics. He has authored, coauthored or edited 30 books and almost 250 peer-reviewed articles. These four volumes are excerpts from this corpus. The first volume includes an intellectual autobiography, bibliography, and assessments of Lebow's contributions to diverse fields by respected authorities. It shows how a scholar's agenda evolves in response to world events and his efforts to grapple with them theoretically and substantively. It elaborates pathways for addressing these events and their consequences in an interdisciplinary manner, and offers new concepts and methods for doing so. Richard Ned Lebow (USA) is Professor of International Political Theory in the Department of War Studies, King's College London and James O. Freedman Presidential Professor Emeritus at Dartmouth College and also a Bye-Fellow of Pembroke College, University of Cambridge He has taught strategy and the National and Naval War Colleges and served as a scholar-in-residence in the Central Intelligence Agency during the Carter administration. He held visiting appointments at the University of Lund, Sciences Po, University of Cambridge, Austrian Diplomatic Academy, Vienna, London School of Economics and Political Science, Australian National University, University of California at Irvine, University of Milano, University of Munich and the Frankfurt Peace Research Institute. He has authored and edited 30 books and nearly 250 peer reviewed articles. Contributors to the book are: Simon Reich - Mervyn Frost - Janice Gross Stein - Stefano Guzzini - Markus Kornprobst - Harald Müller - Christian Wendt - Robert English.
Richard Ned Lebow: Major Texts on Methods and Philosophy of Science
by Richard Ned LebowThis book about the philosophy of science is the second out of four volumes by Richard Ned Lebow in this book series. It not only provides a useful overview of this broad topic, but also provides deeper insight into specific topics like the philosophy of science causation, epistemology and methods, and especially on counter factual analysis.
Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher
by Neil GrossOn his death in 2007, Richard Rorty was heralded by the New York Times as “one of the world’s most influential contemporary thinkers. ” Controversial on the left and the right for his critiques of objectivity and political radicalism, Rorty experienced a renown denied to all but a handful of living philosophers. In this masterly biography, Neil Gross explores the path of Rorty’s thought over the decades in order to trace the intellectual and professional journey that led him to that prominence. The child of a pair of leftist writers who worried that their precocious son “wasn’t rebellious enough,” Rorty enrolled at the University of Chicago at the age of fifteen. There he came under the tutelage of polymath Richard McKeon, whose catholic approach to philosophical systems would profoundly influence Rorty’s own thought. Doctoral work at Yale led to Rorty’s landing a job at Princeton, where his colleagues were primarily analytic philosophers. With a series of publications in the 1960s, Rorty quickly established himself as a strong thinker in that tradition-but by the late 1970s Rorty had eschewed the idea of objective truth altogether, urging philosophers to take a “relaxed attitude” toward the question of logical rigor. Drawing on the pragmatism of John Dewey, he argued that philosophers should instead open themselves up to multiple methods of thought and sources of knowledge-an approach that would culminate in the publication of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, one of the most seminal and controversial philosophical works of our time. In clear and compelling fashion, Gross sets that surprising shift in Rorty’s thought in the context of his life and social experiences, revealing the many disparate influences that contribute to the making of knowledge. As much a book about the growth of ideas as it is a biography of a philosopher, Richard Rorty will provide readers with a fresh understanding of both the man and the course of twentieth-century thought.
Richard Rorty (Sage Masters In Modern Social Thought Ser.)
by Alan MalachowskiRichard Rorty is notorious for contending that the traditional, foundation-building and truth-seeking ambitions of systematic philosophy should be set aside in favour of a more pragmatic, conversational, hermeneutically guided project. This challenge has not only struck at the heart of philosophy but has ricocheted across other disciplines, both contesting their received self-images and opening up new avenues of inquiry in the process. Alan Malachowski provides an authoritative overview of Rorty's considerable body of work and a general assessment of his impact both within philosophy and in the humanities more broadly. He begins by explaining the genesis of Rorty's central ideas, tracking their development from suggestions in his early papers through their crystallization in his groundbreaking book, "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature". Malachowski evaluates some of the common criticisms of Rorty's position and his ensuing pragmatism. The book examines the subsequent evolution of his ideas, focusing particularly on the main themes of his second major work, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. The political and cultural impact of Rorty's writings on such diverse fields as feminism, cultural and literary theory, and international relations are also considered, and the author explores why Rorty's work has generally found its warmest reception in these areas rather than among mainstream philosophers.
Richard Rorty, Liberalism and Cosmopolitanism (Routledge Studies in American Philosophy #2)
by David E McCleanRichard Rorty was one of the most controversial and influential philosophers of the late twentieth century. McClean re-evaluates Rorty’s work in the light of his liberal cosmopolitan outlook, showing how it can be applied to a range of social and political issues.