I've been reading this book my man Franz laid on me. It's less a book than a collection of essays, all by the recently deceased philosopher Richard Rorty, who calls himself a protege of the old-school American Pragmatist, and favorite of mine, John Dewey. It's been getting me thinking quite a bit.

Franz was the one who originally turned me on to Dewey. He gave me The Public and Its Problems when we first met in mid 2003; reading this book in the thick of the Dean campaign created the cornerstone of my positive political idealism (as opposed to my reactionary anti-war activism). I've long wanted to try and write this out as a kind of manifesto, and someday I probably will, but that's a bit off the track for this post.

So Rorty's book is a bit more unabashedly heady than the stuff of Dewey's that I've come to know. He's addressing an academically philosophical audience, so it's more obtuse and answers a bunch of questions that most of us take for granted. Still, those questions underly a lot, and I like the way he deals with them.

The first essays outline the concept of pragmatism as a romantic polytheism, which breaks down as follows: