Abstract

Richard Rorty's path to hermeneutics was different from that taken by most other philosophers. He revisited the hermeneutical tradition sporadically throughout the 1980s. The papers collected in Essays on Heidegger and Others, the fruits of an abortive, abandoned attempt to write a book about him, present an ambivalent view of the philosophers in this tradition. In Rorty's view, a concern with truth is a mere historical accident: a bump on the journey from a religious culture to a literary one. Rorty's approach to social phenomena is also anti‐hermeneutical. Hermeneutical thinkers tend to be suspicious of individualistic or atomistic accounts of human existence. They prefer holistic accounts that see the social dimension of human existence as primary, and individuals as abstractions from it. Hermeneutical philosophers also tend to think that conveying the primacy of the social requires distinctive, inventive language.