1 Rorty and Foucault’s Political Disagreement 8 1.1 Postmodern Bourgeois Liberalism and the Public-Private Split 9 1.2 Rorty’s Disagreement with Foucault 19 2 Conceptual Relativism 28 2.1 Foucault and Epistemology 30 2.2 Rorty and the Davidsonian Attack on Conceptual Relativism 37. Defending Rorty Pragmatism and Liberal Virtue Liberal democracy needs a clear-eyed, robust defense to deal with the. Virtue Liberalism 1 1 Rorty’s Pragmatism: The Critique of Philosophy as Authoritarian 31. Postmodern sensibilities. For this, we turn to Richard Rorty. Rorty, with his ingenious combination of American.
. Part of the book series (LAPS, volume 31) Abstract Richard Rorty, it has been recently asserted, is the most influential thinker in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy (Haber 1994, p.7).
Richard Rorty is also an imperialist. He claims dominion for a new postmodern bourgeois liberalism. According to Rorty, postmodern bourgeois liberalism represents another generation in a genealogy which begins with Kant and then moves through Heidegger, sprouts illegitimate offspring in the likes of Foucault and Derrida, and then comes to rest with the liberal ironist like himself. More than this, Rorty claims dominion for postmodern bourgeois liberalism over a number of other political philosophers including John Rawls and Roberto Unger.
The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the nature of this particular genealogy and to assess the validity of Rorty’s dominion.