Sifting through the Ashes and the Fragments of BoneA Previously Unpublished Essay of 2018Konrád, György; Sherwood, Peter
2022 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754x-10046375
In this autobiographical essay, written in 2018 and previously unpublished, the late György Konrád intertwines his memories as a child during World War II with more theoretical reflections (and unanswered questions) on the war, its repercussions, its lessons. Written in Hungarian not long before his death in 2019, Konrád goes back in this essay to the period following the arrest of his parents after the German invasion of Hungary. Aged eleven, he was able to escape the small town where he was born—and hence the fate of its entire Jewish community. “The others had been turned to ash,” in Konrád's chilling words. Seventy years later, he proceeds from these events to reflect on guilt and contrition, on sympathy and empathetic suffering, on how friends can become enemies during war, as well as on the Jewish heritage underlying Christian culture.
Trotsky and the Wild OrchidsRorty, Richard
2022 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754x-10046488
Among Rorty's most admired essays, and probably his most autobiographical, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids” made its first appearance as a column in Common Knowledge during the journal's inaugural year. Here it is reprinted, thirty years later, in a symposium called “Whatever Happened to Richard Rorty?” He explains in this essay that, as a child, he loved things that would seem to others contradictory, for example the Trotskian socialism to which his family was committed and the wild orchids that he would search for in the local mountains. Finding his own way between what appeared to others contrary kinds of demand or appeal, he never settled, as a philosopher and public intellectual, on syntheses that made good sense to his contemporaries. They were unable to locate him on their intellectual and political maps. As he writes, “If there is anything to the idea that the best intellectual position is one which is attacked with equal vigor from the political right and the political left, then I am in good shape. . . . The left's favorite word for me is ‘complacent,’ just as the right's is ‘irresponsible.’ ” The editors of Common Knowledge, a venue that Rorty helped to found, have reprinted this essay as a way of stating their view that nothing has “happened to Richard Rorty” in the past three decades that did not happen as well when he was active in his own self‐defense. He was misconstrued but indispensable when alive, and has remained so in the decades since.
Rorty Against RortyClimate Change, Rug-Pulling, and the Rhetoric of PhilosophyGaskill, Nicholas
2022 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754x-10046502
As the leading contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Whatever Happened to Richard Rorty?,” this essay asks why Rorty was so often taken to be saying things that he claimed he was not. The argument is that Rorty's rhetorical approach and jargon engendered this confusion and undermined his effectiveness as a philosopher and public intellectual. The focus here is on two points: first, on how, in his eagerness to shut down attempts to claim a privileged path to Reality, he gave the impression of dismissing not only hierarchies but also distinctions; and second, on how his separation of causes and reasons retained a dualism of the “one world, many perspectives” model that elsewhere he rejected. This essay concludes that leading figures of science studies at the present time, notably Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, and Donna Haraway, better equip readers to move past the feeling of deprivation that comes from shedding centuries‐old philosophical assumptions and that their explicit rejection of the nature/culture binary makes their work better suited to addressing the great problem of our time — climate change.
Rorty, Science Studies, and the Politics of Post-TruthVoparil, Chris
2022 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754x-10046516
In a symposium built around a critical reassessment by Nicholas Gaskill of Richard Rorty's pragmatism, this contribution examines the provocative question of whether Rorty's rhetoric hinders Rortian aims. When reconsidering him in company with “the philosophical wing of science studies” (Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, and Donna Haraway), Gaskill finds that Rorty's persistent assumption of nature/culture and word/world dichotomies is politically dangerous and prevents his comprehending both distributed agency and the complexity of human entanglements with the nonhuman. Gaskill's Rorty lacks a sustained and coherent positive project, but a fuller picture, outlined in this article, reveals not only greater alignment of Rorty with science studies and agential realism but also key Rortian contributions to those fields that are particularly of moment in our “post‐truth” condition.
Antirepresentationalism Before and After RortySmith, Barbara Herrnstein
2022 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754x-10046530
Richard Rorty's rejection of prevailing interior‐mirror understandings of the presumed relationship between “minds” and “nature,” along with his promotion of nonrepresentational accounts of knowledge, truth, and science, participates in a rich tradition of jointly pragmatist and constructivist views that spans the twentieth century. This contribution to the symposium “Whatever Happened to Richard Rorty?” considers Rorty's complex and ambivalent relation to that tradition, particularly to the work of his American pragmatist predecessors, William James and John Dewey, and to subsequent pragmatist‐constructivist antirepresentationalism in contemporary science and technology studies (STS) and “4E” (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive) cognitive theory. A final section on Nicholas Gaskill's contribution to the symposium questions his sense of Rorty's rhetorical recklessness and suggests that his worries over relativism, in Rorty's texts and more generally, are misplaced.