This volume presents a selection of the philosophical papers which Richard Rorty has written over the past decade, and complements three previous volumes of his papers: Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, Essays on Heidegger and Others, and Truth and Progress. Topics discussed include the changing role of philosophy in Western culture over the course of recent centuries, the role of the imagination in intellectual and moral progress, the notion of ‘moral identity’, the Wittgensteinian claim that the problems of philosophy are linguistic in nature, the irrelevance of cognitive science to philosophy, and the mistaken idea that philosophers should find the ‘place’ of such things as consciousness and moral value in a world of physical particles. The papers form a rich and distinctive collection which will appeal to anyone with a serious interest in philosophy and its relation to culture.

理查德·羅蒂(Richard Rorty，1931-2007)，當代美國最有影響力的哲學傢、思想傢，美國新實用主義哲學和後現代主義的代錶人物之一。羅蒂在耶魯大學取得哲學博士學位，曾執教於普林斯頓大學、弗吉尼亞大學、斯坦福大學。羅蒂的主要著作在國內齣版的有：《哲學和自然之鏡》及《後哲學文化》等。

理查德·羅蒂生前親自選取在其學術生涯的不同時期所發錶的具有代錶性的論文，經過分類整理而成本套自選集，其中大多數論文是第一次在國內齣版，具有很高的學術價值。