Abstract

It is widely agreed that Rorty’s enduring influence is due not only to his ideas but also to how he presented them in writing. This chapter is the first comprehensive account of how that writing worked. It is comprehensive in that it takes into account both Rorty’s individual style – which was expressed by Rorty across different genres and throughout his career, including his metaphysical, analytic, and pragmatist periods – as well a particular genre of philosophical writing that he invented in the late 1970s and is associated with the most. The chapter argues that the character of that particular genre, whose paradigmatic examples include essays such as “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing” and the lectures comprising Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, was determined mainly by a specific therapeutic goal Rorty wanted to achieve through his writing. That is, to weaken the foundationalist intuitions Rorty thought to underlay mainstream philosophy and encourage the pragmatist intuitions he advocated for.