The Importance of Words: Ironism, Liberalism, and the Affectivity of Final Vocabularies.

FEDERICO PENELAS

State College

Congreso; 2° Conference of the Richard Rorty Society; 2019

Penn State University y Richard Rorty Society

Richard Rorty's work hasrevealed itself, especially since the late '80s, as the defense of a liberalutopia sustained in a certain private/public division. Recently, from different interpretations of theessay "Redemption from Egotism", it has been argued that Rortyhimself either rejected that distinction (as my friend Robert Doran pointedout) or reconfigured it (as my friend Tracy Llanera pointed out from theconcept of ?self-enlargment?). Rorty himself, in one of his last texts, wasexplicit in abandoning the distinction. In this text I intend to defend thedistinction in purely Rortian terms, from a special approach to how we shouldunderstand the notions "final vocabulary" and "ironism."