Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty - Paperback

by Richard Rorty (Author), Eduardo Mendieta (Editor)

This volume collects a number of important and revealing interviews with Richard Rorty, spanning more than two decades of his public intellectual commentary, engagement, and criticism. In colloquial language, Rorty discusses the relevance and nonrelevance of philosophy to American political and public life. The collection also provides a candid set of insights into Rorty's political beliefs and his commitment to the labor and union traditions in this country. Finally, the interviews reveal Rorty to be a deeply engaged social thinker and observer.

Front Jacket

This volume collects a number of important and revealing interviews with Richard Rorty, spanning more than two decades of his public intellectual commentary, engagement, and criticism. In colloquial language, Rorty discusses the relevance and nonrelevance of philosophy to American political and public life. The collection also provides a candid set of insights into Rorty's political beliefs and his commitment to the labor and union traditions in this country. Finally, the interviews reveal Rorty to be a deeply engaged social thinker and observer.

Back Jacket

Brilliant, lively, ethically inspiring, Richard Rorty's new compilation is an extension of his recent political analysis and diagnosis of the contemporary American condition. At least since Philosophy and Social Hope, but certainly well before then, Rorty has been one of the precious few eminent social critics and commentators whose thoughts are always conveyed with philosophical sophistication and supreme literary stylization. This is the kind of book that, unlike so many others today, truly deserves to be talked about, debated, and reviewed everywhere. --Drucilla Cornell, Rutgers University
"Rorty is an extraordinarily important and influential philosopher, both inside and outside philosophy. His thoughtful political and social views are worth presenting in interview format . . . . Many of the interviews here are otherwise inaccessible, making this collection invaluable." --Samuel C. Wheeler III, University of Connecticut

Author Biography

Richard Rorty is Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He is the author of three volumes of Philosophical Papers (1991-1998), and Philosophy and Social Hope (1999). Eduardo Mendieta is Associate Professor of Philosophy at SUNY, Stony Brook. He is the author of Adventures of Transcendental Philosophy: Karl-Otto Apel's Semiotics and Discourse Ethics (2002).