The first time I read Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity – it was 1999 and I was a sophomore in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Rome – I clearly felt that I was reading one of the most influential books in contemporary philosophy: not surprisingly, nobody on the stuffy Italian philosophical scene was talking about it. With its at once light-hearted and corrosive irony against philosophers’ egotism, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity changed the way I looked at philosophy both as a discipline and as a faculty. And yet there was something unsettling in Rorty’s attempt to strip post-Hegelian irony of any kind of public dimension:.
