Rorty, Public Reason, and Modernity's Crisis of Critique

Rorty, Public Reason, and Modernity's Crisis of Critique
Author: Ivan Marquez
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 169
Release: 2024-11-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1666968765

Starting with Richard Rorty’s critique of reason, this book discusses modernity’s legitimation crisis in political discourse. Rorty, Public Reason, and Modernity's Crisis of Critique explores the contemporary crisis of rational justification and collective will-formation in our current political institutions and the public sphere, arguing that there is an array of untapped rational resources that should be deployed to justify social, political, and economic views, agendas, and programs. It also identifies limits to the powers of public reason to generate rational agreement and collective will-formation. Using a critical analysis of Rorty’s non-foundationalist perspective as a vehicle to study modernity’s project of rational critique, Ivan Marquez highlights both the strengths and promise and the weaknesses and limitations of liberal and democratic societies—especially within pluralistic socio-cultural contexts—and some possible ways to work within this space of possibilities and constraints. Ultimately, this book can be seen as elaborating a political epistemology view that argues for a redefinition of philosophy and defends a type of post-metaphysical culture.

Europe

Europe
Author: Jürgen Habermas
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 157
Release: 2014-11-05
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0745694675

The future of Europe and the role it will play in the 21st century are among the most important political questions of our time. The optimism of a decade ago has now faded but the stakes are higher than ever. The way these questions are answered will have enormous implications not only for all Europeans but also for the citizens of Europe’s closest and oldest ally – the USA. In this new book, one of Europe's leading intellectuals examines the political alternatives facing Europe today and outlines a course of action for the future. Habermas advocates a policy of gradual integration of Europe in which key decisions about Europe's future are put in the hands of its peoples, and a 'bipolar commonality' of the West in which a more unified Europe is able to work closely with the United States to build a more stable and equitable international order. This book includes Habermas's portraits of three long-time philosophical companions, Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida and Ronald Dworkin. It also includes several important new texts by Habermas on the impact of the media on the public sphere, on the enduring importance religion in "post-secular" societies, and on the design of a democratic constitutional order for the emergent world society.

The Practice of Political Theory

The Practice of Political Theory
Author: Clayton Chin
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2018-08-28
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0231547994

Recent political thought has grappled with a crisis in philosophical foundations: how do we justify the explicit and implicit normative claims and assumptions that guide political decisions and social criticism? In The Practice of Political Theory, Clayton Chin presents a critical reconstruction of the work of Richard Rorty that intervenes in the current surge of methodological debates in political thought, arguing that Rorty provides us with unrecognized tools for resolving key foundational issues. Chin illustrates the significance of Rorty’s thought for contemporary political thinking, casting his conception of “philosophy as cultural politics” as a resource for new models of sociopolitical criticism. He juxtaposes Rorty’s pragmatism with the ontological turn, illuminating them as alternative interventions in the current debate over the crisis of foundations in philosophy. Chin places Rorty in dialogue with continental philosophy and those working within its legacy. Focused on both important questions in pragmatist scholarship and central issues in contemporary political thought, The Practice of Political Theory is an important response to the vexed questions of justification and pluralism.

Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
Author: Richard Rorty
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 222
Release: 1989-02-24
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780521367813

In this 1989 book Rorty argues that thinkers such as Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein have enabled societies to see themselves as historical contingencies, rather than as expressions of underlying, ahistorical human nature or as realizations of suprahistorical goals. This ironic perspective on the human condition is valuable on a private level, although it cannot advance the social or political goals of liberalism. In fact Rorty believes that it is literature not philosophy that can do this, by promoting a genuine sense of human solidarity. A truly liberal culture, acutely aware of its own historical contingency, would fuse the private, individual freedom of the ironic, philosophical perspective with the public project of human solidarity as it is engendered through the insights and sensibilities of great writers. The book has a characteristically wide range of reference from philosophy through social theory to literary criticism. It confirms Rorty's status as a uniquely subtle theorist, whose writing will prove absorbing to academic and nonacademic readers alike.

Crisis, Movement, Management: Globalising Dynamics

Crisis, Movement, Management: Globalising Dynamics
Author: James Goodman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2016-05-23
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1134905610

Globalised neo-liberalism has produced multiple crises – social, ecological, political. In the past, crises of global order have generated large-scale social transformations, and the current crises likewise hold a transformative promise. Social movements become a crucial barometer, in signalling both the demise and rise of political formations and programs. Elite strategies, framed as crisis management, create their own disordering side-effects. Experiments in movement strategy gain greater significance, as do contending elite efforts at repressing, managing or displacing the fall-out. In this book we investigate both movements and management in the face of crisis, taking crisis and unanticipated consequences as a normal state-of-play. The book enquires into the winners and losers from crisis, and investigates the movement-management nexus as it unfolds in particular localities as well as in broader contexts. The book deals with some of the most pressing conflicts of our time, and produces a range of theoretical insights: the ubiquity of crisis is seen as not only a hallmark of social life, but a way into a different kind of social analysis. This book was published as a special issue of Globalizations.

Critical Theory

Critical Theory
Author: Max Horkheimer
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 313
Release: 1972-01-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0826400833

These essays, written in the 1930s and 1940s, represent a first selection in English from the major work of the founder of the famous Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. Horkheimer's writings are essential to an understanding of the intellectual background of the New Left and the to much current social-philosophical thought, including the work of Herbert Marcuse. Apart from their historical significance and even from their scholarly eminence, these essays contain an immediate relevance only now becoming fully recognized.

Reason After Its Eclipse

Reason After Its Eclipse
Author: Martin Jay
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2016-04-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 029930650X

Tackles a question as old as Plato and still pressing today: What is reason, and what roles does and should it have in human endeavor? The eminent intellectual historian Martin Jay surveys Western ideas of reason, particularly in German philosophy from Kant to Habermas.

The Habermas Handbook

The Habermas Handbook
Author: Hauke Brunkhorst
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 789
Release: 2017-10-24
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0231535880

Jürgen Habermas is one of the most influential philosophers of our time. His diagnoses of contemporary society and concepts such as the public sphere, communicative rationality, and cosmopolitanism have influenced virtually all academic disciplines, spurred political debates, and shaped intellectual life in Germany and beyond for more than fifty years. In The Habermas Handbook, leading Habermas scholars elucidate his thought, providing essential insight into his key concepts, the breadth of his work, and his influence across politics, law, the social sciences, and public life. This volume offers a comprehensive overview and an in-depth analysis of Habermas’s work in its entirety. After examining his intellectual biography, it goes on to illuminate the social and intellectual context of Habermasian thought, such as the Frankfurt School, speech-act theory, and contending theories of democracy. The Handbook provides an extensive account of Habermas’s texts, ranging from his dissertation on Schelling to his most recent writing about Europe. It illustrates the development of his thought and its frequently controversial reception while elaborating the central ideas of his work. The book also provides a glossary of key terms and concepts, making the complexity of Habermas’s thought accessible to a broad readership.

Achieving Our Country

Achieving Our Country
Author: Richard Rorty
Publisher:
Total Pages: 159
Release: 1999
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780674003125

One of America's foremost philosophers challenges the lost generation of the American Left to understand the role it might play in the great tradition of democratic intellectual labor that started with writers such as Walt Whitman and John Dewey.

Romanticism and Pragmatism

Romanticism and Pragmatism
Author: U. Schulenberg
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2015-02-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 113747419X

This interdisciplinary project is situated at the boundary between literary studies and philosophy. Its chief focus is on American Romanticism and it examines work by a number of prominent writers and philosophers, from Whitman and Thoreau to Barthes and Rorty.