Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom (Philosophy and the Eclipse of Reason) (Volume 1)

In the first volume of a three-volume study on the trajectory of the western philosophical tradition and the state of contemporary philosophy, Roy Bhaskar sets out to develop a critique of the work of Richard Rorty, whose "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" and "Contingency, Irony and Solidarity" are regarded as two of the most influential books of recent decades. The author shows how Rorty falls victim to the epistemological problematic he himself describes. Roy Bhaskar argues that Rorty's account of science and knowledge is based on a half-truth. He sees the historicity of knowledge, but cannot sustain its rationality or the reality of the objects it describes. The author further argues that Rorty's problem-field replicates the Kantian resolution of the third antinomy: we are determined as material bodies, but free as discursive (speaking and writing) subjects. Rorty's actualism (like Kant's) makes human agency impossible. Developing his own original transcendental and critical realist philosophy, Roy Bhaskar shows just where Richard Rorty's system comes unstuck, and how the philosophical problems to which it gives rise can be rationally resolved. In this process Roy Bhaskar utilizes his critique of Rorty to begin to elaborate his own alternative interpretation and critique of the philosophical conversation of the west.