Rorty and Dewey on philosophy and democracy : toward a fruitful conversation

Abstract

In his first published essays of the early 1960s, Richard Rorty was preoccupied, not unlike William James, with «the spectacle of philosophers quarreling endlessly over the same issues». He embarked upon a search for avenues of «fruitful conversation», as he called it, that ultimately led him to pragmatism (1967, p. 1; see also 1961, 1962)1 . This paper takes up the respective contributions of Rorty and John Dewey to the topic of philosophy and democracy in this spirit of fruitful conversation and has two primary aims. The first is to offer a reading of Rorty’s work over the last decade of his life, particularly the essays collected in his final volume of philosophical papers, Philosophy as Cultural Politics (2007), to support the claim that Rorty’s embrace of the idea of philosophy as cultural politics marks an explicit affirmation of deweyan ideas. The second is to examine the shared terrain, as well as the divergences, between these two thinkers that come into view as a result of this reading, with an eye to advancing pragmatism’s contribution to democracy and the social and moral issues of our time.