At the time of his death in 2007, Richard Rorty was widely acclaimed as one of the world's most influential contemporary thinkers. Stanley Cavell, who has been a leading intellectual figure from the 1960s to the present, has been just as philosophically influential as Rorty though perhaps not as politically divisive. Both philosophers have developed from analytic to post-analytical thought, both move between philosophy, literature and cultural politics, and both re-establish American philosophical traditions in a new and nuanced key.
The Ironist and the Romantic: Reading Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell finds the sound of Rorty's cheerful pragmatism strikingly at odds with the anxious romanticism of Cavell. Beginning from this tonal discord, and moving through comprehensive comparative analysis on the topics of scepticism, American philosophy, literature, writing style and politics, this book presents the work of its central figures in a novel and mutually illuminating perspective. Áine Mahon's unique and original comparative reading will be of interest not only to those working on Rorty and Cavell but to anyone concerned with the current state of American philosophy.
Charting separate tracks through the perilous thickets of philosophizing after Wittgenstein, both Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell have refused the hollow clichés and boastful promises by which far too much of contemporary philosophy lets itself off the hook. How can we fully confront the unmooring of foundations, the persistence of disagreement, and other fraying problems of our cultural present? In launching a comparative study of Cavell and Rorty, Áine Mahon has her finger on the pulse of the humanities today in all of their strange rhythms. With clear prose and catchy phrase, Mahon develops productive engagements with Rorty, Cavell, literature, film, and the philosophy of philosophy. In so doing, she motivates our engagement with two of the best options available to us in the philosophical present, and she shows how these options both refract and resist one another.
