Our keynote speaker will be Ramón del Castillo, Professor in the Facultad de Filosofía at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia in Madrid, Spain.

The Call for Abstracts is now available here. We hope to see you in Mexico!

This conference proposes to shed light on the work of the philosopher Richard Rorty. Rorty’s name is widely known within and beyond the departments of philosophy, but there have been few major conversations on his work in France, despite a strong editorial tradition and many workshops at several universities. If Rorty is known for his critical readings of the analytic tradition, the ethical and political aspects of his work still remain under-explored. We are thinking in particular of the continual relevance of his seminal 1983 text, ‘Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism’, given at a meeting on the social responsibility of intellectuals, which Rorty saw as an opportunity to explain certain tendencies in liberal thought that he considered naive. By focusing on the political aspect of Rorty’s work that engages his redefinition of liberalism, this conference aims to contribute to the study of the intellectual history, philosophical value and contemporary legacy of this aspect of his philosophy. 

Three lines of enquiry characterise this conference’s approach: (1) we will examine whether Rorty’s emphasis on contingency, irony and post-modernity throughout his work remains relevant today; (2) we will illuminate Rorty’s approach to the arts, and their relationship with his liberalism ; (3) we will re-explore Rorty’s classic argument, which attempts to explain the functioning of language without recourse to the notion of representation.

Please find the programme of the conference here: https://www.translitterae.psl.eu/repenser-rorty-politique-langage-et-esthetique/.

To attend the conference online, and receive the Zoom details, please register here. 

Organizers: Micol Bez, Katie Ebner-Landy, Mathias Girel, Bernardo Marques

The Italian Association Pragma for the study of pragmatism is pleased to announce the call for its first “Premio Pragma”-Award. The Award was established to encourage and cultivate the rich tradition of European research on pragmatism in its various forms. Contributions in Italian language are welcome from junior scholars working on any aspect of pragmatism:

L’associazione italiana Pragma per lo studio del pragmatismo è lieta di annunciare il primo bando relativo al “Premio Pragma”. Con l’istituzione di questo premio l’associazione vuole incentivare la ricerca plurale che si rinnova attraverso i contributi di giovani ricercatrici e ricercatori e intende coltivare la ricca tradizione di ricerca europea sul pragmatismo.

A tale scopo, è possibile inviare entro la data del 15 Maggio 2023 contributi di lunghezza compresa tra 5000-8000 parole da parte di dottorande/i, nonché dottoresse e dottori di ricerca entro quattro anni dalla discussione della testi di dottorato. Sono esclusi dalla partecipazione gli studiosi strutturati.

Il premio consiste in 300 € e comprende la potenziale pubblicazione del contributo vincitore nella sezione Multilingual nel numero 2/2023 dello “European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy”, dopo aver superato il referaggio previsto dalla rivista. I contributi possono confrontarsi sia con il pragmatismo classico, sia con il neopragmatismo e il pragmatismo contemporaneo. L’associazione intende valorizzare particolarmente la tradizione europea che coniuga l’indagine su temi contemporanei con la consapevolezza del retaggio storico. Sono benvenuti contributi negli ambiti della 1) filosofia teoretica; 2) della filosofia di impostazione storico/storiografica; 3) della filosofia etico-politica e dell’estetica – con particolare riguardo ai rapporti con tradizioni affini con le quali si sono instaurati prolifici scambi, tra cui, ad esempio, l’ermeneutica e la fenomenologia, l’idealismo, il razionalismo, e la filosofia antica. I contributi devono essere redatti in lingua italiana e saranno valutati sulla base della loro originalità, della capacità di interagire con il dibattito esistente, della qualità dell’argomentazione e del possibile impatto sulla ricerca, la società e l’attualità culturale. 

I contributi devono essere mandati in formato .docx oppure pdf entro la data del 15 maggio all’email: premiopragma@gmail.com, specificando a quale dei tre ambiti di ricerca il contributo fa riferimento. La commissione di valutazione sarà composta sia da ricercatrici confermate sia da giovani ricercatori, tenendo rigorosamente conto del gender mainstreaming.

Video recordings of Rorty’s 1996 lectures at the University of Girona – collected in the volume “Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism” available now from Harvard University Press – recently have been made available online.

The videos include discussions after each lecture that feature invited discussants Bob Brandom, John McDowell, and Bjorn Ramberg.

Thanks to Bob Brandom for bringing these to the attention of the Richard Rorty Society!

Join us for the virtual 2021 Mini-Conference to hear Elin’s paper, along with sessions led by Christopher Voparil and W.P. Małecki, Martin Müller, Eduardo Mendieta, and Anindita Balslev.

The RRS Mini-Conference will be held Thursday, October 14 and Friday, October 15, beginning at 1:00pm Eastern Time (US and Canada) both days. A draft of the program is available here.

Register in advance for the Mini-Conference by clicking here. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the conference.

The Symposium, edited by Michela Bella and Chris Voparil, “Rethinking Rorty’s Pragmatism: Ethics after Epistemology” was recently published in the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy. You can check it out here!

Recently, the Richard Rorty Society hosted the second international conference at Penn State University, with the title “Rorty’s Ethics.” The conference took place November 22-24^th, 2019 at the Nittany Lion Inn, in State College. For this second international conference, Prof. Robert Brandom was the keynote speaker. The responses to his two plenaries were delivered by Richard Bernstein and Brady Bowman. The full program and details can be found at the Society’s Website. Below, I talk with Eduardo Mendieta about the conference…..

Visit the Blog of the APA to read more about the Richard Rorty Society’s recent conference at Penn State!

Check out CBC Radio One’s episode of IDEAS on Richard Rorty, recorded at the second meeting of the Richard Rorty Society. It features many of our members, including Eduardo Mendieta, Marianne Janack, Christopher Voparil, Susan Dieleman, Richard J. Bernstein, and Mary V. Rorty, among others. You can read more, and listen online, here.

Check out On the Media’s recent story, where Andrew Marantz speaks about Rorty and with Dr. Eduardo Mendieta  You can listen here.