Weighing a pig doesn't fatten it.

For an introduction to American philosopher Richard Rorty, check out my review of What Can We Hope For?, a collection of essays on politics.

In the introduction of that review, I write a bit about how Rorty – the philosopher that most resonates with me – is still relevant to today’s polarized politics, and to the ineptness of the Left. Aside from trying to provide a summary of some of the book’s content, that review also links Rorty to Kim Stanley Robinson – who wrote a novel about the foundations of science, hammering home some of the same points via fiction.

Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism collects the original versions of the lectures Rorty gave at the University of Girona, Spain, during a week in June of 1996, as that year’s Ferrater Mora Lectures. Other thinkers that have delivered Ferrater Mora Lectures were Jane Goodall, John Searle, Daniel Dennett, Peter Sloterdijk, Joseph Stiglitz, Peter Singer and Noam Chomsky – to name but a few.

This collection was published posthumously – Rorty died in 2007. It is the first full English publication of the 10 Girona lectures, and there is an argument to be made it is his last great book, the culmination of his thoughts on pragmatism, on par with his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature from 1979, and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity from 1989. The lectures were published in Catalan in 1998, and in Spanish in 2000. And while 8 of the lectures have been published in English before – spread out over 6 different publications, some hard to find, some somewhat redacted – they have never been presented in English as the logical whole they form.

The book has a solid 20-page foreword by Robert Brandom, who introduces the overarching ideas, and a 7-page epilogue by Eduardo Mendieta, who zooms in on the book’s genesis. There are 24 pages of notes, and a 10-page index.

The original title of the series of lectures was “Anti-Authoritarianism in Epistemology and Ethics”. I’ll first give the outline as it was presented on flyers at the time, as that gives a quick impression of what this book is about.

1. Is knowing the most distinctively human capacity?
2. Knowledge from a Darwinian point of view
3. Pragmatism as romantic utilitarianism
4. The linguistification of pragmatism
5. A world of relations without substances
6. Cartesian skepticism and Cartesian dualism
7. Two misleading Kantian distinctions: justification vs. truth and sentiment vs. obligation
8. The anti-Kantian revolt in ethics
9. Brandom’s neo-Wittgensteinian philosophy of language
10. McDowell on the relation between reason and nature

The dust jacket summarizes it like this: “Anti-authoritarianism (…) means acknowledging that our cultural inheritance [science and ethics are a part of this inheritance] is always open to revision because no authority exists to ascertain the truth, once and for all. If we cannot rely on the unshakable certainties of God or nature, then all we have left to go on – and argue with – are the opinions and ideas of our fellow humans. (…) Pragmatism demands that we think and care about what others think and care about (…). After all, our own beliefs are as contestable as anyone else’s.”

I want to stress that the collection is accessible to readers without any prior knowledge of Rorty, but you do need a grasp of Philosophy 101 – or at least access to a good dictionary. This book is a tad more difficult than What Can We Hope For?, which might be a better introduction – just like an excellent collection of interviews published in 2005: Take Care of Freedom, and Truth Will Take Care of Itself – fully on archive.org.

This post will be quote-heavy, because I simply can’t say it any better than Rorty himself. Obviously the essays are much, much richer and much, much more nuanced than my short write-ups will be.

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