Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom

✍ Scribed by Roy Bhaskar

• Publisher: Blackwell
• Year: 1991
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 217
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

In Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom Roy Bhaskar sets out to develop a critique of the work of Richard Rorty, who must be one of the most influential authors of recent decades. In a brilliant tour de force, Bhaskar shows how Rorty falls victim to the very epistemological problematic Rorty himself describes.

Roy Bhaskar argues that Rorty's account of science and knowledge is based on a half-truth. He sees the historicity of knowledge, but cannot sustain its rationality or the reality of the objects it describes. The author further argues that Rorty's problem-field replicates the Kantian resolution of the third antinomy: we are determined as material bodies, but free as discursive (speaking and writing) subjects. Rorty's actualism (like Kant's) makes human agency impossible.

Developing his own critical realism, Bhaskar shows just where Rorty's system comes unstuck, and how the philosophical problems to which it gives rise can be rationally resolved and explained. In this process Bhaskar utilizes his critique of Rorty to begin to elaborate his own alternative interpretation and critique of the philosophical conversation of the West.

✦ Table of Contents

Preface vii Acknowledgements x Abbreviations in the text xi
Section One Anti-Rorty 1
Part I Knowledge 3
1 Rorty's account of science 5
2 Pragmatism, epistemology and the inexorability of
realism 24
Part II Agency 45
3 The essential tension of Philosophy and the Mirror of
Nature - or a tale of two Rortys 47
4 How is freedom possible? 70
Part III Politics 79
5 Self-defining versus social engineering - poetry and
politics: the problem-field of Contingency, irony and
solidarity 81
6 Rorty's apologetics 97
Part IV Kibitzing 109
7 Reference, fictionalism and radical negation 111
8 Rorty' s changing conceptions of philosophy 129
Section Two For Critical Realism 137
9 Critical realism in context 139
Appendix 1 Social theory and moral philosophy 145
Appendix 2 Marxist philosophy from Marx to Althusser 162
General index 186
Name index 199