Rorty and the Ethos of the Pragmatic Community: Replies

Abstract

In this essay I respond to four commen-tators who participated in a symposium on my book, Reconstructing Pragmatism. Issues that emerge include: Addams’s and Rorty’s mutual commitment to cultivating affective rationality; how Royce and Rorty share an ethical imperative in their philosophy and where both can learn from Alain Locke; what a post-Rortyan pragmatism might look like and the best path toward realizing it; the significance of recovering the serious, unironic Rorty and the lim-its of weak misreadings; Rorty’s pragmatic maxim; and reflections on how best to sus-tain the habits and practices of a robust pragmatic tradition and community. In places, for understandable reasons the com-mentaries stray from the book’s argument about Rorty’s relation to classical pragmatism and address larger issues surrounding Rorty’s work and its broader reception. I don’t respond to all such matters but try to here and there, which hopefully gives what follows a relevance for contemporary pragmatism beyond the book itself.