Rorty's writings on religion to appear as a book in September

Columbia University Press publishes in September the texts in which Richard Rorty searches for common ground between philosophy and religion: Finding Common Ground Between Philosophy and Religion.

The introduction is by the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, the foreword by Jeffrey Robbins. The book runs to 352 pages.

An unlikely pairing?#

Rorty (1931-2007) was among the best-known secular philosophers of the twentieth century. He described himself as an atheist and rejected philosophy's claim to hold a mirror up to truth. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) is the classic statement of that rejection.

That such a thinker's writings on religion should be collected may look surprising at first. But Rorty's approach to the question of religion follows directly from his general method.

Is "keeping the conversation going" enough?#

Rorty's basic move is to shift philosophical argument away from the question of who is right and towards the question of what a given vocabulary allows us to do.

Where religion is concerned, the consequence of that move is instructive. Rorty does not try to prove religion true or false; he regards the dispute as insoluble. His criterion is a different one: does a vocabulary help people to be less cruel to one another?

On that criterion Rorty draws a distinction about religion's place in public life. To use religion as an authority that terminates political argument is a problem, because it closes the argument down. But there is no reason to exclude religion as a source of solidarity.

The Vattimo connection#

It is no accident that Vattimo should write the introduction. The Italian philosopher used the notion of "weak thought" (pensiero debole) to argue for the dissolution of metaphysics' strong claims to truth, and later connected that dissolution to the history of Christianity itself.

Vattimo and Rorty worked together on several occasions; their jointly authored The Future of Religion (2005) is the product of that dialogue. The new volume can be read as a continuation of the same line.

Rorty in Turkish#

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity and Philosophy as Cultural Politics are among his books translated into Turkish.