Introduction: Richard Rorty, Pragmatic Provocateur

Barry Allen, Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at McMaster University and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is the author of Empiricisms: Experience and Experiment from Antiquity to the Anthropocene; Truth in Philosophy; Knowledge and Civilization; Art and Technology in Human Experience; Knowledge in Chinese Tradition; and Striking Beauty: A Philosophical Look at the Asian Martial Arts.

Richard Rorty (1931–2007) successively held chairs at Princeton University (in philosophy), the University of Virginia (in the humanities), and Stanford University (in comparative literature). He was a MacArthur fellow from 1981 to 1986. Among his most influential publications are The Linguistic Turn; Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature; Consequences of Pragmatism; Philosophy and Social Hope; Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity; Achieving Our Country; and four volumes of Philosophical Papers.

Nicholas Gaskill is associate professor of American Literature at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Chromographia: American Literature and the Modernization of Color (2018) and coeditor (with A. J. Nocek) of The Lure of Whitehead (2014). He is currently writing a history of intensity as an aesthetic category and a study of pragmatist efforts in aesthetic education across literature, art, and philosophy.

Chris Voparil, founding president of the Richard Rorty Society, teaches in the graduate faculty of Union Institute and University. He is the author of Reconstructing Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Classical Pragmatists and Richard Rorty: Politics and Vision, as well as coeditor of The Rorty Reader; Pragmatism and Justice; and two posthumous books by Rorty: On Philosophy and Philosophers: Unpublished Papers, 1960–2000, and What Can We Hope For?: Essays on Politics.

Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Braxton Craven Professor of English and Comparative Literature emerita at Duke University and founder of its Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an honorary fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her books include Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory; Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy; Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth, and the Human; Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion; and, most recently, Practicing Relativism in the Anthropocene.