One thing I’ve been gradually noticing since I joined an education department a few years ago is how influential posthumanism is within education vis-a-vis other theoretical perspectives. I wouldn’t suggest this is anything other than an impressionistic judgement, based on the journals I choose to look at and the topics […]
The self as painting: we become who we are through repetition and representation. Encumbered only by our imagination and the culture in which we find ourselves, we craft ourselves through iterated projects of self-representation. We might find the materials available to us limiting, in which case we might seek out […]
Lovely spot by Chris Hedges from a book I read many years ago which, as far as I can tell, made nearly zero impression on me at the time. This quotes from Rorty’s Achieving Our Country: Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized democracies are heading into […]
In contrast to the scorn which Rorty’s name now provokes in some quarters, it’s arresting to see the esteem in which he was held by Roy Bhaskar in the late 80s, albeit in the context of a trenchant philosophical critique. He commends Rorty’s “eloquent critique of the epistemological problematic” but […]
Since reading this astonishing book by Neil Gross earlier in the year I have been increasingly aware of the latent influence of pragmatism on my thought. I used to really like Richard Rorty but came to think it was just a phase, explicable in terms of the resources his work gave me to […]
The process of de-divinization which I described in the previous two chapters would, ideally, culminate in our no longer being able to see any use for the notion that finite, mortal, contingently existing human beings might derive the meanings of their lives from anything except other finite, mortal, contingently existing […]
I’m finally in the process of reading this intellectual biography of Richard Rorty by Neil Gross. I’ve intended to for a few years now, given my long term fascination with Rorty, however it was only recently that I had it pointed out to me that I’d find the substantive analytical […]
