First published in 2011. In Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom Roy Bhaskar sets out to develop a critique of the work of Richard Rorty, who must be one of the most in?uential authors of recent decades. In a brilliant tour de force, Bhaskar shows how Rorty falls victim to the very epistemological problematic Rorty himself describes. Roy Bhaskar argues that Rorty-s account of science and knowledge is based on a half-truth. He sees the historicity of knowledge but cannot sustain its rationality or the reality of the objects it describes. The author further argues that Rorty-s problem-?eld replicates the Kantian resolution of the third antinomy: we are determined as material bodies, but free as discursive (speaking and writing) subjects. Rorty-s actualism (like Kant-s) makes human agency impossible. Developing his own critical realism, Bhaskar shows just where Rorty-s system comes unstuck, and how the philosophical problems to which it gives rise can be rationally resolved and explained. I
