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What’s the Use of Truth? RORTY RICHARD. AND ENGEL PASCAL. Edited by Savidan Patrick. Translated by McCuaig William. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016 ; 80 pp.; $20.00 (paper)
This little book has its origins in a lively public debate held at the Sorbonne in November 2002. The two participants give opposing answers to the central question posed in the title of the book. The late Richard Rorty, an American pragmatist, is known for his determined campaign against a realist conception of truth. Pascal Engel, an analytic philosopher—somewhat unusual given his French origins—has published a number of works defending the notion of truth and its utility.
Each of the debaters checked and made revisions to their portions of the text for this English version of their debate. The resulting short book contains a major statement by each of the participants and a follow-up discussion consisting of two responses by both Rorty and Engel. The contributions are uneven in length, with Rorty’s contributions being about half the length of Engel’s. Perhaps it is for this reason that the book also includes Rorty’s review of Engel’s 2002 book, entitled simply, Truth (McGill-Queen’s University Press). In his review, Rorty concurs with Engel that “most of the history of twentieth-century analytic philosophy is a sort of battlefield opposing various ‘realist’ and ‘anti-realist’ conceptions of truth” (66). This debate provides a good summary of the battlefield, with both writers making reference to the main players in...