Antipodean Dialogues: Richard Rorty and the discursive authority of conversational philosophy

Péter Csató's Antipodean Dialogues concentrates on the work of Richard Rorty, one of the most celebrated and debated philosophers of our time. It sets out to explore Rorty's concept of conversational philosophy in its relation to discursive authority. Rorty famously insists that philosophy is best to be looked upon as an ongoing and open conversation, which comports with his professed commitment to liberal democratic values. The book's main contention, however, is that despite his commendable anti-authoritarian endeavors, Rorty deploys certain rhetorical strategies in some of his texts which serve the purpose of establishing a privileged position for his own neopragmatist idiom. The author identifies four such strategies and examines them in different, but related contexts. In the first half of the book, he takes a metaphilosophical approach to the problematic of discursive authority, and argues that Rorty's championing the notion of philosophy as conversation necessarily entails an act of normalization, and that the main function of his concept of irony is to serve as a means of metacontextualization, rather than that of private self-fashioning. The second half, in turn, focuses on two specific cases: his appropriation of Jacques Derrida's deconstructive philosophy, and his exclusion of religion from the sphere of public discourse. Both cases aptly demonstrate the ways in which Rorty, through his pragmatic rhetoric, wields discursive authority over other discourses. Nevertheless, this endeavor is never evinced at the level of his arguments, but rather in the rhetorical/performative dimensions of his philosophy.