Rorty and Dewey revisited: Toward a fruitful conversation

Abstract

The existing body of scholarship on Rorty’s relation to Dewey devotes relatively little attention to the shared commitments that animate their respective projects and what they hold in common philosophically. This article aims to shift the discourse from assay-ing Rorty’s faithfulness to Dewey to clarify-ing and critically examining the differences that make a difference between their re-spective projects of philosophical recon-struction and democratic meliorism, in the hope of learning from mutually corrective insights and moving pragmatism beyond stale impasses. Highlighting the continuity between Rorty’s early work and later Phi-losophy as Cultural Politics in a commitment to a Deweyan notion of philosophy as an instrument of social change, I argue that their differences are most fruitfully under-stood against the backdrop of their shared attentiveness to cultural context, the socio-political character of philosophical inquiry, pressing issues of the day, and the need for philosophers to transcend professionalized debates.