Foreword Achieving the Enlightenment
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 23719708 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Robert B Brandom, Robert Brandom (0000-0001-5478-8567, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Pages | vii-xxvi |
| Publication date | 2021-12-31 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | CHAPTER |
| Venue | Pragmatism As Anti-Authoritarianism (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Harvard University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.4159/9780674270077-001 |
| OpenAlex | W3199650187 |
| ISBN | 9780674270077 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism is Richard Rorty's long-lost, last book. 1 Its first English-language publication is an epoch-making event.Written ten years before his death, this volume pre sents Rorty's final, mature version and vision of his path-breaking pragmatism.Further, it announces a substantially new phase in the development of that view.At its core is a commitment to human self-determination.The principal animating and orienting impulse of pragmatism is now identified as its anti-authoritarianism.Its ultimate goal is our emancipation, both in practice and in theory, from subjection to nonhuman authority.Pragmatism points us at the sort of freedom that consists in humans taking full rational responsibility for our own doings and claimings.On this conception, pragmatism is an intellectual movement of worldhistorical significance.Rorty construes pragmatism as aiming at nothing less than a second Enlightenment-as offering what is needed properly to complete the task begun in early modern times by the first Enlightenment.The key to the conceptual division of labor he envisages between the two historical phases of the Enlightenment is the "anti-authoritarianism" of the title-a theoretical and a practical attitude.It is the rejection in both spheres of the traditional understanding of authority and responsibility in terms of subordination and obedience.It is to be replaced by a conception of judging and acting as exercising the authority to undertake commitments that come with a correlative responsibility to justify them, to offer reasons for them that can be assessed by our fellow discursive prac ti tion ers.As Rorty is thinking of it, the great achievement of the original Enlightenment is on the side of ethics.In broadest terms, it is substituting the secular for the sacred in our understanding of the source and nature of our most
Enlightenment · Epistemology · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice · Hermeneutics and Narrative Identity · History · Philosophy · Pragmatism in Philosophy and Education
| Citations per year | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2023 - 2024 (2) |
| Highly cited | No |