Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2

The phrase names Rorty's attempt to place pragmatism in a lineage that runs through Nietzsche rather than through Kant or Mill. Post-Nietzschean philosophy, for Rorty, is philosophy that has abandoned the search for ahistorical foundations and accepts that thought is shaped by history, language, and contingent practice. Heidegger and Derrida are the central figures in this lineage, and Rorty's introduction argues that pragmatism can enter into conversation with them without adopting their metaphysical or political commitments. The phrase is deliberately loose: it allows Rorty to treat Nietzsche as a shared ancestor of both the European tradition and American pragmatism, a genealogy that many Nietzsche scholars and many pragmatists would contest.

Rorty's treatment of Heidegger is consistently bifurcated: he admires the critique of the philosophical tradition while refusing to excuse or ignore the politics. The essay 'Philosophy as Science, as Metaphor, and as Politics' engages Heidegger's thought on its own terms, but Rorty does not allow the question of Nazism to disappear. His strategy is to separate the anti-metaphysical insight from the political failure, arguing that pragmatists can take the former without the latter. Critics have charged that this separation is too clean, and that Heidegger's politics are not an accidental excrescence but are embedded in his conception of Being and history. The essay on Kundera and Dickens offers Rorty's alternative: the novel, not ontology, is the better guide to moral and political life.

Rorty's Derrida essays, including 'Deconstruction and Circumvention' and 'Is Derrida a Transcendental Philosopher?,' argue that Derrida's value lies in his textual play and his refusal of systematic philosophy, not in any positive doctrine or political program. Rorty is critical of what he sees as the American appropriation of Derrida by literary critics who turn deconstruction into a method or a politics. The essay on Paul de Man and the American Cultural Left extends this critique: Rorty charges that de Man's followers have used Derridean ideas to support a cultural politics that is vague, evasive, and disconnected from practical reform. The separation of Derrida from his admirers is characteristic of Rorty's broader strategy of rescuing thinkers from their disciples.

Rorty's essay on Foucault, 'Moral Identity and Private Autonomy,' treats Foucault with suspicion: he is described in one reader's summary as 'loathsome,' and Rorty's argument suggests that Foucault's private project of self-creation offers little for public politics . Habermas, by contrast, is engaged more seriously as a social theorist, even though Rorty disagrees with his appeal to universal communicative rationality. The essay on Habermas and Lyotard on postmodernity positions Rorty between them: he shares Lyotard's suspicion of grand narratives but rejects his political quietism, and he shares Habermas's commitment to liberal institutions but rejects his foundationalism. The alignment that emerges is a pragmatist liberalism that borrows from both but settles with neither.

The early reception was largely disappointing. A German handbook on Rorty notes that reviews by Richter (1993) and Gottlieb (1991) either met Rorty's arguments with counter-assertions or failed to engage them substantively, while Lichtigfeld (1994) offered a chain of quotations that shortened the essays beyond recognition . The exception was Rosenberg's 1993 review, which engaged Rorty with philosophical depth as well as humor. A recurring criticism is that Rorty uses Heidegger, Derrida, and others for his own purposes rather than interpreting them faithfully. One reader review on ThriftBooks captures this: 'Rorty once again proves himself a master of the consolidation of varying ideas... but he is using them for the purpose of propagating his own views' . Defenders reply that Rorty never claimed to be a neutral interpreter.

Essays on Heidegger and Others is best read as the companion volume to Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. The 1989 book lays out the theoretical framework: the contingency of language, the liberal ironist, and the separation of private self-creation from public solidarity. The 1991 essays apply that framework to specific European thinkers, showing how Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault can be read as ironists whose private projects have little to offer public politics. The volume thus supplies the continental genealogy that Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity had presupposed without fully arguing. Where the earlier book is systematic, the later collection is occasional and polemical, but the two together form Rorty's most sustained engagement with the European tradition.