Rorty (Richard) Archives - Public Seminar

Literature

Sunday Readings: Texts and Commentary

November 12, 2016 • by Laura Nelson

The Left is very good at both recrimination and self-recrimination. While salutary, both can be carried to extremes, and thus become self-defeating. Public protest about the election of Trump is both understandable and righteous – after all, he has publically and I assume sincerely expressed contempt for the norms and ...

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Prophets of Irony: a Discussion with Richard J. Bernstein

November 2, 2016 • by Laura Nelson

Richard J. Bernstein, Ironic Life (Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 2016), pp. 184, $64.95 hardcover, $22.95 paperback. There is a certain irony about contemporary attitudes toward irony. According to the late novelist David Foster Wallace, our culture is steeped in the ironic reluctance to commit to ideals and thus embrace moral seriousness. ...

Prophets of Irony: a Discussion with Richard J. Bernstein

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Patriotism, Nationalism, Exceptionalism

August 1, 2016 • by Laura Nelson

Over the past fortnight, two very different versions of patriotism were put on display. One of them was xenophobic, hostile, and downright plug-ugly. The other was hopeful, inclusive, and cheerful. Even though the media-saturated presentations of each were designed to “sell” a prepackaged vision of the political community known as ...

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Hilary Putnam

March 14, 2016 • by Laura Nelson

The Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam passed away on Sunday, March 13 2016, at the age of 89. It’s safe to say that while he was alive, Putnam was remembered not so much for a persistent theme or doctrine (such as: Quine’s rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction, or Gadamer’s notion of ...

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Pragmatism’s Promise

February 21, 2016 • by Laura Nelson

One of the many definitions of “dialectic” is “a method of examining and discussing opposing ideas in order to discover the truth”; another is “discussion and reasoning by dialogue as a method of intellectual investigation.” On either definition, Richard J. Bernstein is indisputably the most proficient and prolific ...

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The Scholar, the Prophet, the Monk, and the Healer

December 28, 2015 • by Laura Nelson

I think it safe to say that 1971 was a watershed year for philosophy, in that it saw the publication of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice. Prior to the publication of that work, political philosophy was in a kind of self-imposed exile. Still in thrall to the metaethical constraints of ...

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Sheldon Wolin

November 23, 2015 • by Laura Nelson

The political theorist Sheldon Wolin passed away on October 21 at the age of 93. Wolin was a significant figure in the Humanities and Social Sciences, for three key reasons: a challenge, a book, and a thesis. The challenge: the consensus, at the start of Wolin’s career in the 1950s, was ...

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Diagnosing American Politics

What the rise of Trump says about American democracy

September 8, 2015 • by Laura Nelson

I have a morbid fascination with Carl Schmitt. Morbid, because he manages to condense, in his political theory and philosophy of law, pretty much everything I find repulsive about the radical right. His pessimism about “human nature” is raw and simplistic and, unlike Hobbes, whom he superficially resembles, ...