Rorty believed that taking the linguistic turn meant rejecting the idea of “immediate experience,” and he was equally certain that philosophy had nothing of value to offer social and political theory. Those convictions distinguished his version of neopragmatism from those of his contemporaries Hillary Putnam, Ruth Anna Putnam, and Richard J. Bernstein, and from the ideas of his predecessors William James and John Dewey. In his last book, Achieving Our Country, Rorty sought to respond to the critics who challenged his public/private dualism by aligning himself with the Cold War-era labor movement. He remained unwilling, however, to acknowledge the costs of moving from the social democratic “historical Dewey” to his preferred “hypothetical Dewey,” an insouciant proto-Rorty who attributed progressive changes to “lucky accidents” and championed the poetized culture of liberal ironism over the hard work of forging new democratic alliances among a new generation of activists inspired by demands for recognition as well as redistribution.

This chapter focuses on Rorty’s engagements with Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault. It argues that, however much he enjoyed these encounters, Rorty’s philosophical views were largely unaffected by them. He tended to endorse what could be assimilated to his own Deweyan pragmatism and reject the rest. In this way, Rorty endorses Heidegger’s diagnosis of the history of European philosophy, while disavowing his criticism of modernity and his nostalgia for an authentic language of Being. He denounces Foucault’s supposed commitment to anarchism and revolution as incompatible with his preferred Deweyan social democratic politics. Only his writings on Derrida provide evidence of deepening understanding of and sympathy with a philosophical project irreducible to his own. Overall, Rorty refuses to accept any philosophical invention on the part of these thinkers. Derrida’s deconstructive argument in favor of an elusive quasi-metaphysics of difference, and Foucault’s genealogies of present institutions and ways of thinking are either ignored or denounced as residues of the tradition they seek to escape. Rorty characterizes each of them as essentially private thinkers, “ascetic priests” who aspire to stand apart from the herd and to be in touch with a reality more profound than the life they share with others.

This chapter begins by arguing that the common tendency to write off Rorty’s views on morality on the grounds that they are vulnerable to straightforward charges of relativism is mistaken if only because it ignores the fact that those views are conceived independently of his epistemological behaviorism. It then moves on to examine the relationship between Rorty’s notion of selfhood and his distinction between public and private morality. In exploring that relationship, a number of problematic issues are identified concerning: Rorty’s dependence on a Freudian multi-personality account of the self, his excessive optimism regarding the demands of self-creation in modern societies, and whether the very idea of morality as a private concern can carry the weight he places upon it. Some of the literary critic Lionel Trilling’s views on the burdens of self-making are introduced to temper Rorty’s utopian expectations.

Despite his role in pragmatism’s resurgence, when it comes to classical pragmatism Rorty’s work has blocked the road of inquiry. His selective interpretations spurred sharp lines of demarcation distinguishing “classical” or “paleo” pragmatism from its “neo” and “new” offspring to protect both classical and new pragmatisms alike from Rorty’s distortive readings. This chapter seeks to move contemporary pragmatism beyond these impasses by investigating largely unexamined avenues of shared commitment between Rorty and Peirce, Dewey, and James. I argue that Rorty is best read as reconstructing classical pragmatism rather than misunderstanding it. After establishing Rorty’s underappreciated early engagement with pragmatism, I trace the influence of Peirce on Rorty’s thought, which includes a commitment to language and to a distinct form of realism which was later obscured. Recognizing Rorty’s notion of “philosophy as cultural politics” as a close relative of Dewey’s conception of philosophy as cultural criticism yields complementary insights overshadowed by the experience vs. language debate. I then elucidate the shared ethics of belief that emerges from James’s “unfinished” universe and Rorty’s recognition of contingency to guide their commitments to agency and a conception of knowledge in which humans are active participants in the construction of what is right and true.

Rorty’s liberalism strays so far from its classical form that one might wonder why we cluster him together with thinkers such as Locke, Kant, or even more recent writers such as Rawls. Clarifying the particulars of Rorty’s political philosophy – his particular liberalism – requires one to enter into a set debates about metaphysics, epistemology, and social thought that go beyond liberalism, veering into literary criticism, critical theory, and Marxism. This chapter begins by laying out the contours of Rorty’s political commitments, beginning with how they first came together in what he calls his “postmodernist bourgeois liberalism.” It then shows how his liberalism finds its fullest expression in the “ideally liberal society” set out in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. It goes on to examine how, in subsequent work, Rorty revised his description of that society in response to criticisms from feminist theorists. It concludes that his later writings indicate that Rorty’s position is potentially more radical than he, or his readers, recognize.

This chapter focuses on Atwood as a Canadian writer and the evolution of her global persona as an international literary celebrity, major thinker, and public spokesperson on global issues of environmentalism and ethical questions related to biotechnology and human rights. Illustrated by its generous inclusion of quotations from Atwood herself, the chapter traces her career development in three stages: “Mapping Her Canada” concentrates on when Atwood addresses fellow Canadians with her early poetry collections, notably Survival and Surfacing; “Interpreting Canada Abroad” reads Canadian themes through an increasingly internationalist lens, featuring The Handmaid’s Tale, The Journals of Susanna Moodie, three short story collections, Kanadian Kultcher Komics, and children’s stories; “Canada in the World” moves between Toronto in her three 1990s historical novels to her postapocalyptic dystopia, the MaddAddam trilogy, returning to Canada with Stone Mattress and Hag-Seed, then back to the United States with The Testaments.

The principal difference between Rorty’s pragmatism and that of Peirce, James, and Dewey is his commitment to the nominalism that Peirce identified as the Achilles’ heel of modern philosophy. In their different ways, Peirce, James, and Dewey sought to eliminate nominalism from empiricism. That is their shared “radical empiricism.” Rorty, by contrast, was deeply impressed by the nominalism, and especially the anti-empiricism, of Analytic philosophy, especially in Sellars, Quine, Davidson, and Brandom. The result of Rorty’s effort to undo the trenchant antinominalism of the classical pragmatists is a pragmatism without much pragmatism, but a strong linguistic relativism, an ironic pragmatism more ironic than pragmatic.

In this introduction, I offer a sketch and overview of some major themes in Rorty’s thought (antirepresentationalism, liberalism, irony, anti-authoritarianism) and try to indicate how they hang together in a coherent (albeit controversial) whole. While Rorty’s work might appear disjointed and occasional given the immense range of this interests, I argue that his philosophy is unified on the whole. I also show how a broadly Darwinian world picture is at the center of Rorty’s philosophy and how this profoundly shapes all of his thinking.

When it comes to religion, Richard Rorty thinks belief is a matter of “cultural politics,” that is, instead of trying to find some rational basis for religion, we should ask whether religious beliefs and practices are conducive to human flourishing or not. It is up to particular communities to make their case that their religion facilitates social and political goals. That is a matter of cultural politics, as opposed to philosophizing on ontological questions about what supernatural entities, if any, exist. Having relaxed evidentialist restrictions against religious beliefs, Rorty insists that religious beliefs are best when they are private and subjective. Religion is like poetry, which can be intensely meaningful for individuals’ lives, and it should be assessed as such. Indeed, he endorses a spirituality of sorts, along these lines. But when religious beliefs are brought into public discourse to support or oppose a policy or a law, they stop conversation short. Ultimately, Rorty acknowledges we shouldn’t prohibit such appeals to religion, but we should discourage and oppose them when they support oppression and inequality.

This chapter surveys Atwood’s three short fiction collections published since 2000 – The Tent, Moral Disorder, and Stone Mattress: Nine Tales – and is a sequel to the chapter “Margaret Atwood’s Short Stories and Shorter Fictions” presented in the original Companion. Arranged in three parts, one on each collection with detailed analyses of examples, the chapter explores generic questions raised in these highly varied collections of short fiction, together with Atwood’s thematic and stylistic range. The Tent features a dazzling mix of prose subgenres: fables, dialogues, essay-fictions, rewritings of myth, and prose poetry, which are analyzed in “No More Photos” and “Our Cat Enters Heaven,” while Moral Disorder, Atwood’s first short story cycle, shows how her storytelling comes closest to the short story proper. Stone Mattress introduces a new variant with its “tales,” moving beyond the boundaries of social realism into genre fiction as Atwood plays with those conventions, combining a strong interest in plot with social and ethical critique.

This chapter, which considers selected Atwood texts over fifty years, focuses on sexual politics in her representations of women’s attempts to define and reclaim possession of their own bodies and identities. Within a framework that includes feminist theorists Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, Joan Riviere, Andrea Dworkin, Susan Bordo, and Wendy Harcourt, the chapter considers the psychological and sociopolitical implications of body denigration. Signaling Atwood’s enduring motif of the disappearing female body without free will, from the early “mud poem” (1974), the chapter explores varieties of women’s self-obliteration and bodily reclamation in The Edible Woman and Lady Oracle, Gilead’s patriarchal domination over female bodies in The Handmaid’s Tale, women’s often ineffectual resistance to bodily objectification in Cat’s Eye and The Blind Assassin, and disturbing futuristic speculations on the possibility of complete possession of female bodies in Oryx and Crake and The Heart Goes Last through biotechnology and robotics.

Presents Margaret Atwood as a Canadian and international literary superstar, introducing students and general readers to the many different and evolving facets of Atwood’s work across all genres, up to and including The Testaments. This revised edition is both a revisiting of Atwood’s earlier work and a charting of new directions since 2000, with emphasis on her increasing engagement with popular genres, especially dystopias and graphic novels, and her influential online presence. The focus is on Atwood’s topicality, with The Handmaid’s Tale and its recent television adaptations now center stage. Atwood engages with a new generation in response to profound changes in reading practices and changing conditions in publishing and marketing. Atwood’s often controversial feminism and her urgent environmental concerns with survival are treated in the brief overview of her work and Atwoodian criticism since 2000, including discussion of the Atwood archives at the University of Toronto.

One of the most remarkable aspects of Richard Rorty’s legacy is the sheer variety of the philosophical imprint from which has thought was formed. His thought not only ranged across Analytic, Continental, and of course Pragmatist philosophy but extended as well into engagements with history, literary criticism, and a wealth of novels. Rorty’s command of such a wide philosophical range is expressive of a kind of metaphilosophical pluralism that was largely missing in his own philosophical milieu and which continues to be sorely needed today. This essay characterizes Rorty’s metaphilosophical pluralism. It begins with an excavation of Rorty’s metaphilosophy in terms of his signature idea of vocabularies. With this in view, it then turns to a neglected source for Rorty’s metaphilosophical pluralism. This source is found in an unexpected branch within philosophical pragmatism, namely that of his onetime teacher, Richard McKeon. Like other pluralisms that preceded his, Rorty’s metaphilosophy will be of enormous value just so long as philosophy remains unsettled about how to account for its disagreements, which is to say just so long as philosophy generates needs for addressing metaphilosophical questions, which is effectively to say just so long as there is such a thing as philosophy.