Richard Rorty's philosophy of history and historiography: Hermeneutical questions

Abstract

Rorty’s views on philosophical historiography, expounded in his famous article «The historiography of philosophy: four genres», are generally known to, and discussed by, the communities of philosophers and historians; the same cannot be said of the question of knowing whether underlying such concepts there is a philosophy of history as such that should be used as a framework to contextualise and interpret them. This article provides a close discussion of these issues; my contention is that Rorty’s philosophy of history, given that he partially dismisses the idea of the existence of foundations for philosophy and its associated historicism, is essentially a philosophy in history; and, further, that the author has progressed from a scatological representation of history, which renders it virtually ineffectual as a tool for transforming human praxis both individually and collectively, towards a semi-foundationalist and semi-historicist representation, from whose perspective it is possible to envisage the contemporary interest of pragmatism as social, cultural, and political philosophy.