Abstract

Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell are both preoccupied with questions of contingency: whether conventions are ‘merely’ conventional, what kind of foothold they might provide, how to step away from convention, how to make convention one’s own. Not that the work of either philosopher could be described as conventional. Neither produced the philosophical equivalent of the ‘hackwork’ characterizing Thomas Kuhn’s ‘normal science’. Both philosophers invoke traditional philosophical argumentation, but do so only to depart from its terms. To some disciplinary sensibilities, both might seem to indulge in meta-philosophy, talking about philosophy rather than doing it. Both thinkers would reject this...