Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers: v.4 is a book is by Richard Rorty

Richard Rorty

Richard McKay Rorty was an American philosopher. He had a long and diverse academic career, including positions as Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton, Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia, and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University...

, the late Professor of Comparative Literature, Emeritus, at Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

.

This book is a compilation of selected philosophical papers written by Richard Rorty has written over the decade, 1997-2007; it complements three previous selections of his papers.

In general the book explores the relation between philosophy

Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

 and culture

Culture

Culture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...

.

Topics covered include:

1. the changing role of philosophy in Western culture over the course of recent centuries,
2. the role of the imagination in intellectual and moral progress,
3. the notion of 'moral identity',
4. Wittgenstein's claim that the problems of philosophy are linguistic in nature,
5. the irrelevance of cognitive science to philosophy
6. the mistaken idea that philosophers should find the 'place' of such things as consciousness and moral value in a world of physical particles.