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³ Bernstein, Richard J., The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 233Google Scholar.

⁴ See, e.g., Rorty, Richard, “Response to Daniel Conway,” in Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues, ed. Festenstein, Matthew and Thompson, Simon (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), 91Google Scholar; Rorty, , Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty, ed. Mendieta, Eduardo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 50Google Scholar; Rorty, Richard, Nystrom, Derek, and Puckett, Kent, Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies: A Conversation with Richard Rorty (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2002), 61–64 Google Scholar; Rorty, , “Reply to J. B. Schneewind,” in The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, ed. Auxier, Randall E. and Hahn, Lewis E. (Chicago: Open Court, 2010), 506Google Scholar; Rorty, “Reply to Raymond D. Boisvert,” in Philosophy of Richard Rorty.

⁵ McCarthy, Thomas, “Private Irony and Public Decency: Richard Rorty's New Pragmatism,” Critical Inquiry 16 (1990): 366–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ Ibid., 370. A similar argument can be found in Ferrara, Alessandro, “The Unbearable Seriousness of Irony,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 16 (1990): 81–107 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷ Fraser, Nancy, “Solidarity or Singularity? Richard Rorty between Romanticism and Technocracy,” Praxis International 8 (1988): 266Google Scholar. For Rorty's response, see Richard Rorty, “Intellectual Autobiography,” in Philosophy of Richard Rorty, 20; Rorty, Nystrom, and Puckett, Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies, 61–62.

⁸ Ball, Terence et al. ., “Review Symposium on Richard Rorty,” History of the Human Sciences 3 (1990): 101– 22Google Scholar; Mouffe, Chantal, “Deconstruction, Pragmatism and the Politics of Democracy,” in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, ed. Critchley, Simon and Mouffe, Chantal (London: Routledge, 1996), 1–12 Google Scholar.

⁹ Voparil, Christopher, Richard Rorty: Politics and Vision (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 134Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Ibid., 135–43.

¹¹ Rorty, CIS, xv.

¹² Ibid. 63.

¹³ Ibid. 37; see also 17.

¹⁴ Fraser, Nancy, “From Irony to Prophecy to Politics: A Response to Richard Rorty,” Michigan Quarterly Review 30 (1991): 262Google Scholar; Rorty, Richard, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” in Philosophical Papers, vol. 3, Truth and Progress (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)Google Scholar. Fraser, however, considered that the positive step Rorty takes in this essay to reconcile his public/private split is still insufficient, since for her his account of the subversive practices of feminist groups is still tainted by a conception of “abnormal discourses” too poeticized, apolitical, and elitist.

¹⁵ Llanera, Tracy, “Rethinking Nihilism: Rorty vs. Taylor, Dreyfus and Kelly,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 42, no. 9 (2016): 937–50Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Curtis, William M., Defending Rorty: Pragmatism and Liberal Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 96–98 Google Scholar.

¹⁷ See, for instance, White, Stephen K., The Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 128–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸ Voparil, Christopher, “Taking Other Human Beings Seriously: Rorty's Ethics of Choice and Responsibility,” Contemporary Pragmatism 11 (2014): 83–102 Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Bernstein, Richard J., “Richard Rorty's Deep Humanism,” New Literary History 39, no. 1 (2008): 13–27 Google Scholar; Auxier, Randall E., preface to The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, ed. Auxier, and Hahn, ; Skowronski, Krzysztof, Values, Valuations, and Axiological Norms in Richard Rorty's Neopragmatism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), chap. 3Google Scholar.

²⁰ Giuseppe Toffanin, cited in Rebollo, Maria José, Dios, héroes y hombres: G. Vico, teórico de la educación (Seville: GIHUS–CIV, 2000), 134Google Scholar.

²¹ Auxier, preface to Philosophy of Richard Rorty, xix.

²² Bernstein, “Richard Rorty's Deep Humanism,” 13, 19.

²³ Rorty, Richard, “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism,” in Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972–1980 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 166Google Scholar.

²⁴ Arendt, Hannah, “The Crisis in Culture,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Viking, 1961), 224–25Google Scholar.

²⁵ Rorty, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” 10.

²⁶ Rorty, Richard, “Cultural Politics and the Question of the Existence of God,” in Philosophical Papers, vol. 4, Philosophy as Cultural Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 6–7 Google Scholar.

²⁷ Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 12, 360Google Scholar.

²⁸ Ibid., 372, 378.

²⁹ Ibid., 359. The penultimate chapter of PMN is entitled “From Epistemology to Hermeneutics,” where the expression “hermeneutics” is taken from Gadamer.

³⁰ Ibid., 320–21, 360, 377.

³¹ Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method, trans. Weinsheimer, Joel and Marshall, Donald G., rev. ed. (London: Continuum, 1993), 179Google Scholar.

³² Cf. PMN, 7; CIS, xvi.

³³ E.g., Rorty, Richard, “Universality and Truth,” in Rorty and His Critics, ed. Brandom, Robert (Cambridge: Blackwell, 2000), 7Google Scholar.

³⁴ Rorty, CIS, 94.

³⁵ On the role of paradiastole in ancient rhetoric see Skinner, Quentin, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chap. 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁶ Quintilian, , Institutio oratoria, trans. Butler, H. E. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920–22)Google Scholar, 8.6.4–5, p. 303. Cf. Cicero, Orator, in Brutus and Orator, trans. Hubbell, H. M. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), 134Google Scholar. Cicero, however, specified that the success of a metaphor depends on giving the impression of not invading an alien place, but occupying one to which it belongs (Brutus, in Brutus and Orator, 274).

³⁷ Rorty, Richard, “Philosophy as Science, as Metaphor, and as Politics,” in Philosophical Papers, vol. 2, Essays on Heidegger and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 12–13 Google Scholar. Cf. CIS, 44.

³⁸ Rorty, CIS, 9.

³⁹ Ibid., 7, 73.

⁴⁰ Ibid., 3.

⁴¹ Gadamer has once defined hermeneutics as the “inversion” of rhetoric (Truth and Method, 188). On Gadamer's views about rhetoric and the humanistic tradition see also ibid., 17ff.; Gadamer, Hans-Georg and Dottori, Riccardo, A Century of Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2004), 50–65 Google Scholar.

⁴² Danish, Robert, “The Absence of Rhetorical Theory in Richard Rorty's Linguistic Pragmatism,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 46 (2013): 156–81Google Scholar; Wain, Kenneth, “Strong Poets and Utopia: Rorty's Liberalism, Dewey and Democracy,” Political Studies 41 (1993): 394–407 Google Scholar.

⁴³ It is precisely in these terms that some of the most distinguished scholars of the rhetorical-humanistic tradition have explained the general sense of this movement: Garin, Eugenio, L'Umanesimo italiano: Filosofia e vita civile nel Rinascimento (Bari: Laterza, 1965)Google Scholar; Grassi, Ernesto, La filosofia dell'Umanesimo: Un problema epocale (Napoli: Tempi Moderni, 1988)Google Scholar; Grassi, Ernesto, Vico e l'Umanesimo (Milano: Guerini, 1988)Google Scholar; Fumaroli, Marc, L’Âge de l'éloquence: Rhétorique et “res literaria” de la Renaissance au seuil de l'époque classique (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994)Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ Rorty, Richard, “Philosophy as a Transitional Genre,” in The Rorty Reader, ed. Voparil, Christopher J. and Bernstein, Richard J. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 477Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ Richard Rorty, “Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism,” in The Rorty Reader, 132.

⁴⁶ E.g., CIS, 81; Rorty, “Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism,” 139–41, 149.

⁴⁷ Richard Rorty, “The Humanistic Intellectual: Eleven Theses,” in Philosophy and Social Hope, 127–30.

⁴⁸ Ibid., 127.

⁴⁹ Rorty, CIS, 80; Richard Rorty, “Redemption from Egotism: James and Proust as Spiritual Exercises,” in The Rorty Reader, 392–93.

⁵⁰ Rorty, “Philosophy as Science, as Metaphor, and as Politics,” 18.

⁵¹ Richard Rorty, “Ethics without Principles,” in Philosophy and Social Hope, 82; Rorty, “Redemption from Egotism,” 247.

⁵² Rorty, CIS, 80–81.

⁵³ Ibid., 87. Cf. Richard Rorty, “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing,” in Philosophy and Social Hope, 90.

⁵⁴ Rorty, Richard, introduction to Philosophical Papers, vol. 1, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 14Google Scholar.

⁵⁵ Vico, Giambattista, “Autobiografia,” in Opere, ed. Nicolini, Fausto (Milano: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1953), 39Google Scholar.

⁵⁶ Vico cited in Battistini, Alessandro, “On the Encyclopaedic Structure of the New Science,” New Vico Studies 12 (1994): 28Google Scholar.

⁵⁷ Ibid., 39.

⁵⁸ E.g., Giambattista Vico, “Dell'antichissima sapienza degli italici,” in Opere, 292, 303.

⁵⁹ Giambattista Vico, “Scienza Nuova,” in Opere, para. 497–98; Vico, “Autobiografia,” 17–18.

⁶⁰ E.g., Cicero, , De oratore, trans. Sutton, E. W. and Rackham, H. (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1942), 2.102CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 1.2.30, 6.2.29–31.

⁶¹ Rorty, CIS, xvi; cf. 93.

⁶² Richard Rorty, “Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality,” in Truth and Progress, 176.

⁶³ Those who aspire to become good orators and politicians should be “reading and listening to everything, and busying themselves with every fitting pursuit and with general culture” (Cicero, De oratore 1.256, p. 169; see also 1.218, 3.72). Cf. Rorty, PMN, 360.

⁶⁴ Arendt, “Crisis in Culture,” 226.

⁶⁵ E.g., Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” 220; Richard Rorty, “Professionalized Philosophy and Transcendentalist Culture,” in Consequences of Pragmatism, 66.

⁶⁶ Danish, “Absence of Rhetorical Theory,” 162.

⁶⁷ Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 12.5.1–2. The ideal based on this comprehensive conception of eloquence proved very influential on the Renaissance Humanists. See, e.g., Garin, L'Umanesimo italiano, 27ff., 94–97; Rice, Eugene, The Renaissance Idea of Wisdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), chap. 2Google Scholar; Seigel, Jerrold, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism: The Union of Eloquence and Wisdom, Petrarch to Valla (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968)Google Scholar.

⁶⁸ Rorty, CIS, xv. Cf. Rorty, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” 6–8, 13.

⁶⁹ Topper, Keith, “Richard Rorty, Liberalism and the Politics of Redescription,” American Political Science Review 89, no. 4 (1995): 955Google Scholar.

⁷⁰ Cf. Curtis, Defending Rorty, 101.

⁷¹ Rorty, CIS, xiii–xiv.

⁷² Ibid., xv. Cf. Rorty, “The Humanistic Intellectual,” 127–28.

⁷³ Rorty, CIS, 97.

⁷⁴ Rorty, Nystrom, and Puckett, Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies, 62–63.

⁷⁵ Rorty, CIS, 88.

⁷⁶ E.g., Rorty, introduction to Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, 13; Richard Rorty, “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, 182.

⁷⁷ Rorty, CIS, xii, 84ff., 142, 198; Richard Rorty, “Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism,” in Philosophy as Cultural Politics, 29, 40; Richard Rorty, “Moral Identity and Private Autonomy,” in Essays on Heidegger and Others, 196–97.

⁷⁸ As he says on one occasion, “we need a constant supply of wild-eyed visionaries to keep coming up with fresh descriptions” since “practice changes only because there are uncommon men and women who suggest how things might be done differently” (“Reply to Raymond D. Boisvert,” 572).

⁷⁹ Rorty, Take Care of Freedom, 50.

⁸⁰ E.g. Isocrates, , Antidosis, in Isocrates in Three Volumes, trans. Norlin, G. (London: Heinemann, 1962), 2:253–55Google Scholar; Cicero, De inventione, in De inventione, De optimo genere oratorum, Topica, trans. Hubbell, H. M. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949), 1.2–3Google Scholar; Cicero, De oratore 1.8, 30–34, 2.124–25, 187, etc.; Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 1.pr.9–10, etc.

⁸¹ Richard Rorty, “Truth without Correspondence to Reality,” in Philosophy and Social Hope, 34.

⁸² Rorty, CIS, 87.

⁸³ Ibid., xiii–xv; Rorty, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” 12–13.

⁸⁴ Rorty, “Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” 190.

⁸⁵ Cf. White, Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen, 107. On Rorty's elitism see Wolin, Sheldon S., “Democracy in the Discourse of Postmodernism,” Social Research 57, no. 1 (1990): 5–30 Google Scholar; and Fraser, “Solidarity or Singularity?”

⁸⁶ Cf. Curtis, Defending Rorty, 96–99.

⁸⁷ Rorty, CIS, 73–74.

⁸⁸ Ibid., 90.

⁸⁹ Ibid., 73–74.

⁹⁰ Rorty, “The Humanistic Intellectual,” 127–28. On Rorty's esotericism see Rogers, Melvin, “Rorty's Straussianism; Or, Irony against Democracy,” Contemporary Pragmatism 1 (2004): 95–121 Google Scholar. Despite his concerns about the harm irony could cause to society and its orders, however, Rorty also recommends that “the crust of conventions… should be as superficial as possible” and “the glue which holds society together… as flexible as possible” (Rorty, “Philosophy as Science, as Metaphor, and as Politics,” 18). This ambivalence testifies to the conundrum in Rorty's thought about the relationship between change and order, consensus and critique.

⁹¹ Rorty, CIS, 90.

⁹² Ibid., 93.

⁹³ Rorty, “Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality,” 272–73.

⁹⁴ E.g., Richard Rorty, “Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism,” in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, 201; Richard Rorty, “Justice as a Larger Loyalty,” in Philosophy as Cultural Politics.

⁹⁵ Rorty, CIS, 48, 60, 84. Rorty's essay “Feminism and Pragmatism” provides one of the most well-elaborated accounts of how, for him, the process through which a society changes its self-image by introducing new vocabularies that come from marginalized groups occurs. Here we can see how Rorty describes the mutual interplay between a rhetoric of difference, necessary for questioning the normal vocabulary of society, and one of consensus, through which the new, extended vocabulary is progressively accepted and normalized. See above, note 14.

⁹⁶ Rorty, PMN, 360. Cf. Voparil, “Taking Other Human Beings Seriously,” 91.

⁹⁷ Rorty, PMN, 360, 366, 372. This form of practical reason is what, for instance, makes us realize that the expression “corresponds to how things are” is “an automatic compliment paid to successful normal discourse” that cannot be extended to abnormal discourse. The attempt “to extend this compliment to feats of abnormal discourse” therefore is “a lack of tact” (ibid., 372).

⁹⁸ E.g., Cicero, Orator, 70 and also 102–6, 108–11, 129–33; De oratore 3.208ff.; Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 6.6.11; Isocrates, Panathenaicus, in Isocrates in Three Volumes, 30.

⁹⁹ On the importance of decorum in Cicero see, for instance, Kapust, Daniel, “Cicero on Decorum and the Morality of Rhetoric,” European Journal of Political Theory 10 (2011): 94Google Scholar; Leff, Michael, “Cicero's Pro Murena and the Strong Case for Rhetoric,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 1 (1998): 61–88 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Michel, Alain, Les rapports de la rhétorique et de la philosophie dans l'oeuvre de Cicéron, 2nd ed. (Louvain: Peeters, 2003), 130–33, 310–18Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁰ E.g., Cicero, De oratore 1.12, 16–18, 20–21, 48–70, 160–203, 2.6, 3.54, 72.

¹⁰¹ Cicero also distinguishes between two kinds of discourses: one adapted more for philosophical conversation among friends, which commands a more rational and impassioned style (sermo), and another public, aimed at action, interested in concrete questions, emotively charged and with a not-too-complex style (contentio). His ideal orator has to be proficient in both. See Cicero, De officiis, trans. W. Millis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938), 1.37.132.

¹⁰² Cicero, De oratore 2.18–20.

¹⁰³ Rorty, CIS, 97.

¹⁰⁴ Rorty, PMN, 366.

¹⁰⁵ His criticism of what he calls the “Foucauldian Left” can be read precisely in this sense: as a reminder to those who think that giving an essential contribution to society occurs by creating more and more sophisticated theories, that in truth they are devoting more to themselves than to society. See, e.g., Rorty, “Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism,” 158; Richard Rorty, “A Spectre Is Haunting the Intellectuals: Derrida on Marx,” in Philosophy and Social Hope, 220.

¹⁰⁶ Llanera, “Rethinking Nihilism”; Rorty, “Redemption from Egotism.”

¹⁰⁷ Ferrara, “Unbearable Seriousness of Irony,” 83, 99–100; Ernesto Laclau, “Deconstruction, Pragmatism, Hegemony,” in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, ed. Critchley and Mouffe, 65; Elshtain, Jean B., Real Politics: At the Center of Everyday Life (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 322Google Scholar; Jürgen Habermas, “Richard Rorty's Pragmatic Turn,” in Rorty and His Critics, 32–33; Bernstein, “Richard Rorty's Deep Humanism,” 25.

¹⁰⁸ Topper, “Richard Rorty, Liberalism and the Politics of Redescription,” 956, 962. Cf. Rorty, CIS, xv, 68.

¹⁰⁹ Wolin, “Democracy in the Discourse of Postmodernism,” 14.

¹¹⁰ Rorty, CIS, 33.

¹¹¹ Joy Connolly, The State of Speech: Rhetoric and Political Thought in Ancient Rome (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 139.

¹¹² Mahon, Áine, The Ironist and the Romantic: Reading Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 133Google Scholar.