Richard Rorty and the problem of postmodern experience : a reconstruction

Author(s)

    • Timm, Tobias

Bibliographic Information

Richard Rorty and the problem of postmodern experience : a reconstruction

Tobias Timm

(American philosophy)

Lexington Books, c2019

  • : cloth

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Note

Bibliography: p. 143-150

Includes index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

Richard Rorty, perhaps the most important philosopher of the past century, refused to write meaningfully about experience due to his postmodern inclination to associate experience with a belief in objectivity and foundational truths. Richard Rorty and the Problem of Postmodern Experience: A Reconstruction explores the context, reasoning, and consequences of this resistance. While for much of our history experience was valued for its potential to teach us about the world, Rorty and his fellow postmodern thinkers encouraged us to doubt the narrative that we can use experience to make epistemological progress. Rather than pursue universal truths about the world, Rorty suggested that we recognize all of our beliefs about the world as being social constructions. In his project to recover a concept of experience from within the framework Rorty has constructed, Tobias Timm describes how classical pragmatist theories of experience are naive about the problem of foundationalism. He also explains how the most common phenomenological work lacks an active subject; experience here is simply something that happens to us, rather than something we actively seek to improve. Timm demonstrates that despite Rorty's insistence that we talk about language instead of experience, there are strong experiential elements in his work. Rorty's romanticism, and his optimism about the accomplishments of western culture, are remedial to the pessimism of postmodern discussions about experience.

Table of Contents

Introduction Chapter One: The Decline of Experience: From Foundationalism to Historicism Chapter Two: Phenomenology and Pragmatism Chapter Three: What Rorty's Pragmatism Adds to Phenomenology Chapter Four: Experience without Foundations Chapter Five: Romanticism, Imagination and Experience: A Linguistic Approach Conclusion: Language as Experience

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Details

  • NCID
    BB29693996
  • ISBN
    • 9781498589239
  • LCCN
    2019019926
  • Country Code
    us
  • Title Language Code
    eng
  • Text Language Code
    eng
  • Place of Publication
    Lanham
  • Pages/Volumes
    x, 153 p.
  • Size
    24 cm
  • Classification
  • Subject Headings
  • Parent Bibliography ID
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