Rating: 
Summary: The Best Philosophy Book Available
Review: Most books on philosophy, like most technical books, are narrowly focused on very specific problems. It's rare to find a philosopher who really takes a broad view and tries to explain the state of philosophy, and how philosophy relates to other disciplines, in a single, very readable book. That's just what Rorty has done in Contingency, irony and solidarity. Many will have had philosophy courses in college which generally lead to more confusion than enlightenment. Most remain mired in religious or scientific thinking and haven't thought about the kind of perspective that is compatible with the realities of the modern world. If you want to get out of Plato's cave and see the world as it probably really is, read Rorty.
Rating:
Summary: The Best Philosophy Book Available
Review: Most books on philosophy, like most technical books, are narrowly focused on very specific problems. It's rare to find a philosopher who really takes a broad view and tries to explain the state of philosophy, and how philosophy relates to other disciplines, in a single, very readable book. That's just what Rorty has done in Contingency, irony and solidarity. Many will have had philosophy courses in college which generally lead to more confusion than enlightenment. Most remain mired in religious or scientific thinking and haven't thought about the kind of perspective that is compatible with the realities of the modern world. If you want to get out of Plato's cave and see the world as it probably really is, read Rorty.
Rating: 
Summary: A Clear but troubled manifesto of Rorty's Social Vision
Review: Rorty does not beat around the bush with his influences. In the past, he has drawn heavily upon Sellars, Quine, Wittgenstein and Dewey. But, I believe, has also done an excellent job of taking neo-pragmatists like Putnam, Davidson and Williams (who have been less than accommodating to Rorty's views) to perhaps their necessary conclusions in the revolution of the analytic epistemological tradition - the turfing of explanatory and "correspondance" theories of truth. But what is most interesting in "Contingency, Irony and Solidarity", is Rorty's attempt to move through such diverse thinkers as the previous mentioned neo-pragmatists, Habermas, Foucault, Derrida and Nietzsche. This helps to illustrate Rorty's views (as a self-declared left wing liberal) on possible social reform and politics.For Rorty historical contingency always undermines any claim to Truth. The fact that scientific explanations have played such an important role in Western culture has less to do with their explaining or corresponding to some "Real World" which is "out there", than with its usefulness in allowing us to make sense of our own cultural experiences and world descriptions. But without such Truth claims to justify various rights, theories and social change, Rorty must find some new rationale for such changes and finds it (not uncontroversionally) in Irony. For Rorty, once one accepts the contingency of all Truth-so-called, the new visionary is the Ironic poet, whose unique way of describing experience through metaphor will impress upon and refine cultural vocabularies and (however contingent) may be assimilated by the broader linguistic community to further social solidarity. This doesn't sound like a convincing formula for radical social reform. And I would say that it is not. Rorty draws upon the familiar public/private dichotomy in explaining that philosophers like Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida and even Habermas. Rorty enjoys what he calls the "later Derrida", the Derrida who writes books like The Postcard and Glas, who in Rorty's eyes is a great private ironist, playing around with philosophy's story. Rorty, I think, gets Derrida wrong. There is no inherent "break" in Derrida's project, books like Glas and The Postcard, I believe, are a continued illustration of Derrida's views on language meaning and contextualization (See Limited Inc and other works). Although Derrida toys, to some extent, with personal questions, his project is very political, intending to alter our way of speaking and writing to exert less textual "violence" - that explains the "urgent tone" that Rorty finds so perplexing in Derrida's early work. Rorty also ultimately disarms Foucault by placing him in the "ironist" private realm. Here, Foucault's expose` of the insidious effects of modern liberal institutions on the individual are reduced to mere metaphors - an ironic private language with no public utility. Perhaps the ultimate irony here, of which Rorty is unaware, is that in this age of continued racial injustice and division, gender inequality and disrespect for minority rights, once again we have a White bourgeois male, arguing that the tools for change like the Civil Rights movement are mislead and without basis, that one cannot speak of "true equality" outside of unique use, and that social change is ultimately in the hands of those who can contribute new voices and ways of speaking to western culture. For in the end, was it not women and minorities who were always excluded from voicing their opinions? And would not Nietzsche see Rorty and his sublime optimism and confidence in the Western liberal tradition as a decadent par excellence?
Rating:
Summary: Influential and useful
Review: This book has influenced my reading and life for many years. Rorty defines what he believes the liberal individual can justifiably stake as his or her claims in the world. I found his views refreshing, light-handed, and extremely useful. I followed many of his sources, including a complete reading of Nabokov's works, and the amazing book, The Body in Pain, by Elizabeth Scary. Some I could tackle, others like Derrida's The Postcard, were over my head, but were still influential. I currently serve on a Board of Trustees and I find myself returning to this book to help frame my thoughts on political governance and on self-governance in a challenging environment. It is a deep well for those who wish to think carefully about how we can and should live now, given all the thought and experience that humankind has accumulated.
Rating:
Summary: Thank God for Rorty ! !-)
Review: This is a very useful book. To equate Rorty's pragmatism with subjectism is to fall precisely into the trap that Rorty saves us from, and to completely miss the point of this book. "We need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that the truth is out there. To say the world is out there, that it is not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most things in space and time are the effects of causes which do not include human mental states. To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations." And again later...
"... the fact that Newton's vocabulary lets us predict the world more easily than Aristotle's does not mean that the world speaks Newtonian. The world does not speak. Only we do." Go read this book!
Rating:
Summary: Thank God for Rorty ! !-)
Review: This is a very useful book. To equate Rorty's pragmatism with subjectism is to fall precisely into the trap that Rorty saves us from, and to completely miss the point of this book. "We need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that the truth is out there. To say the world is out there, that it is not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most things in space and time are the effects of causes which do not include human mental states. To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations." And again later...
"... the fact that Newton's vocabulary lets us predict the world more easily than Aristotle's does not mean that the world speaks Newtonian. The world does not speak. Only we do." Go read this book!
Rating:
Summary: Spokesman for the contemporary mind
Review: To be frank, I don't feel Rorty contributes anything new as far a language, politics and philosophy goes. That being said however I think frames and articulates issues of contemporary thought better than anyone I've ever read. In discussing areas that can get dense and abstract very quickly, Rorty frames the discussion clearly and concisely. Since reading this book I always try and fall back on his approach to the human language, both theoretically and pragmatically (if you'll excuse the pun).
Rating: 
Summary: What Does Rorty Want?
Review: What does Rorty want? It seems that to me that what Rorty wants is the right for everybody to be fashionably insane. Not unfashionably insane, like the people that you put in mental hospitals, but fashionably insane, like Nietzsche. For what else can all this talk of paradigm change and self-creation and the linguistic relativity of theory construction etc. amount to the end but the right to create one's own little hermetically sealed world, just like that of the madman's? And what can politics amount to in the end except the facilitation of the creation of such worlds? Hasn't Rorty heard that the private is the political? If there were no truth, it would have to be invented. Without the monolithic entities of Truth and Reality, discourse sunders into billions of little pieces, as each of us finds his/her own "pragmatic" version of "truth." Good luck. This is all quite tendentious, of course, so let me just say that "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity" is a classic. If you want to find a comprehensive statement of post-whatever, you could find no better place to start than here.
Rating: 
Summary: a new dogmatism
Review: When i first read this book, Rorty had me hooked on his program. Unfortunately, after some reflection, it became clear to me that there is little behind Rorty's arguments (and they ARE "arguments" no matter how much he wants to deny this) other than appeals to popular consensus. I would have given this book 1 star but it is admittedly well written and isn't nearly as difficult as some other "postmodern" philosophers. However, the content is lacking. To begin, Rorty contends that there is no absoulute "truth" and supports a view of strong linguistic/ cultural relativism. Although i don't think that anybody is going to contend, on the other hand, that we can gain some ultimate and complete worldview (Hegel), to deny this does not require that we then make dogmatic claims such as "we can never know if our language corresponds to reality" or simply "we cannot know reality" (both of these are also incoherant claims. for example, in saying that language doesnt correspond to reality is to speak of the reality of language). There's a whole lot of middle ground between absolute knowledge and no knowledge-- middle ground that Rorty ignores. Furthermore, just as Rorty critisizes all of those great "metaphysicians" for "worshipping" Spirit, Being, Reason, etc. , a case can be made that Rorty is worshipping language and culture. It isn't outrageous to say that Rorty thinks that, on a "public" level, we should consider books to be more important than our individual concerns and fantasies. Rorty makes a lot of bold claims, such as saying that all discourse amounts to language games and metaphor, however, never backs up these claims. Rather, he leaves that job to a certain plague of political correctness. For example, it is really in tune with "equal rights" to say that even science is purely metaphorical-- sure, all uses of language are the same, just like blacks are equal to whites, women to men, etc. This sounds nice, but without any support it becomes purely dogmatic (of course, there is plenty to support that, at a fundamental level, blacks are equal to whites, etc. However, the same cannot be said of the language of science versus the language of literature.) And if we are going to rely on dogmatism, why not christianity? In conjuction with this, just as Rorty denies "self-evident" truths, he has to appeal to intuition repeatedly. For example, when he says "languages are made, not found". how does he know this? Ah, intuition...Finally, and perhaps most importantly, are the problems with Rorty's social vision. Whereas thinkers like Deleuze and Guattari seek, in many ways, to eliminate the distinction between the private and the public, Rorty seeks to make this distinction clear. To me this sounds "highly Oedipal"-- keep your fantasies to your self, etc. Rorty condemns thinkers of "creation" such as Nietzsche and Deleuze (although Rorty doesnt explicitely discuss the latter) to the private realm. Rorty wants to for us to talk about books and not ourselves. Despite his supposed deep concern with social problems, one gets the impression that Rorty had never left his comfortable desks and comfortable upper-middle class white male lifestyle and ventured (or even considered intellectually) into an inner city, etc. -- places of REAL social distress. When looked at from this perspective, Rorty's concerns seem whiny and mundane -- as if he is sketching an ethics for the intellectual community (and even an idealized one, at that) -- not a real commmunity with real distresses, concerns, and conflicts.
Rating:
Summary: a new dogmatism
Review: When i first read this book, Rorty had me hooked on his program. Unfortunately, after some reflection, it became clear to me that there is little behind Rorty's arguments (and they ARE "arguments" no matter how much he wants to deny this) other than appeals to popular consensus. I would have given this book 1 star but it is admittedly well written and isn't nearly as difficult as some other "postmodern" philosophers. However, the content is lacking. To begin, Rorty contends that there is no absoulute "truth" and supports a view of strong linguistic/ cultural relativism. Although i don't think that anybody is going to contend, on the other hand, that we can gain some ultimate and complete worldview (Hegel), to deny this does not require that we then make dogmatic claims such as "we can never know if our language corresponds to reality" or simply "we cannot know reality" (both of these are also incoherant claims. for example, in saying that language doesnt correspond to reality is to speak of the reality of language). There's a whole lot of middle ground between absolute knowledge and no knowledge-- middle ground that Rorty ignores. Furthermore, just as Rorty critisizes all of those great "metaphysicians" for "worshipping" Spirit, Being, Reason, etc. , a case can be made that Rorty is worshipping language and culture. It isn't outrageous to say that Rorty thinks that, on a "public" level, we should consider books to be more important than our individual concerns and fantasies. Rorty makes a lot of bold claims, such as saying that all discourse amounts to language games and metaphor, however, never backs up these claims. Rather, he leaves that job to a certain plague of political correctness. For example, it is really in tune with "equal rights" to say that even science is purely metaphorical-- sure, all uses of language are the same, just like blacks are equal to whites, women to men, etc. This sounds nice, but without any support it becomes purely dogmatic (of course, there is plenty to support that, at a fundamental level, blacks are equal to whites, etc. However, the same cannot be said of the language of science versus the language of literature.) And if we are going to rely on dogmatism, why not christianity? In conjuction with this, just as Rorty denies "self-evident" truths, he has to appeal to intuition repeatedly. For example, when he says "languages are made, not found". how does he know this? Ah, intuition...Finally, and perhaps most importantly, are the problems with Rorty's social vision. Whereas thinkers like Deleuze and Guattari seek, in many ways, to eliminate the distinction between the private and the public, Rorty seeks to make this distinction clear. To me this sounds "highly Oedipal"-- keep your fantasies to your self, etc. Rorty condemns thinkers of "creation" such as Nietzsche and Deleuze (although Rorty doesnt explicitely discuss the latter) to the private realm. Rorty wants to for us to talk about books and not ourselves. Despite his supposed deep concern with social problems, one gets the impression that Rorty had never left his comfortable desks and comfortable upper-middle class white male lifestyle and ventured (or even considered intellectually) into an inner city, etc. -- places of REAL social distress. When looked at from this perspective, Rorty's concerns seem whiny and mundane -- as if he is sketching an ethics for the intellectual community (and even an idealized one, at that) -- not a real commmunity with real distresses, concerns, and conflicts.
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