In the early 1970s, Richard Rorty, a professor of philosophy at Princeton, decided that his discipline had reached a point of exhaustion. Although his anthology The Linguistic Turn (1967) was assigned in every first-year graduate seminar in the country, and his introduction had praised “linguistic philosophy” for cleansing the field of metaphysical rubbish, the activity seemed to him academic and inconsequential. At one time, philosophers had expounded wisdom and justice to a broad intellectual audience. But, by 1970, philosophers discussed counterfactual conditionals within a shrinking circle of professionals. “American philosophers’ disinterest in moral and social questions became almost total,” Rorty recalled (though he surely meant “uninterest.”) The problems were linguistic, the solutions technical, their significance doubtful.

The renovation of philosophy, he decided, lay in a dormant school of thought: pragmatism, which he dubbed “the chief glory of our country’s intellectual tradition.” In William James and John Dewey, he found an outlook that skirted epistemological puzzles and forsook universals. Their mode of argument was revisionist and liberating, for they “wrote, as Nietzsche and Heidegger did not, in a spirit of social hope.” In Rorty’s version, pragmatists didn’t refute epistemology; they ignored it. They focused on beliefs, not theory; practice, not reflection. Philosophers proposed and debated theories of truth, knowledge, and morality; pragmatists pared them down to their practical consequences. While his colleagues worried over a theory’s truth, validity, coherence, and consistency, Rorty took pragmatic counsel and asked, “Does it work? What difference does it make if we act upon