Richard Rorty: Becoming a Contemporary Political Philosopher

This article follows Rorty's imaginative style in trying to articulate two different visions: his own and Hannah Arendt's on seminal questions. Arendt and Rorty have many common concerns and they share critical approaches toward the notion of truth, the question of using imagination, and the effective tools of literature concerning morality and politics. However, some of the differences between them, are also revised here, since Arendt was not a liberal, optimistic thinker. She had lived rough years, while Rorty was still trying to make his humble point about liberalism and democracy. To him the least complicated open-minded and fallible position as a thinker was to trace his experiences as limited but good enough to claim some defenses about them. In reflecting on these two thinkers, I seek to bring Rorty's pragmatist, eclectic and most original style to the forefront.