Misreading and misundestanding as consequences of decontextualization and recontextualization of neopragmatism in France

Abstract

The reconstructions presented in the article on the reception of R. Rorty and R. Schusterman by French philosophical thought have their own characteristics, but each of them is carried out in the French national philosophical field, which is marked by its own conflicts and delineated by its own disciplinary divisions. If the French social sciences are more dynamic and have a frank interest in pragmatism and neo-pragmatism, its reception by philosophical thought runs into numerous obstacles. In the case of R. Shusterman, the most important obstacle is the difference in disciplinary boundaries between different intellectual disciplines, when what Shusterman the philosopher does in the United States is in France the field of interest of sociology. At the same time, the reception of R. Rorty is most blocked by recent French history, when Rorty's philosophical theses cause negative connotations on the basis of their kinship with phenomenology, existentialism and postmodernism. These are the directions that the philosophers of analytical inspiration, who open Rorty to the French reader, aim to eliminate. These obstacles of a general nature are shown in the article through the prism of the discussion between R. Rorty and P. Angel regarding the concept of truth and L. Pento's appeal to R. Shusterman's analysis of popular art. Both cases best illustrate the thesis of H. Joas that the international circulation of ideas is marked by the phenomena of misreading and misunderstanding, which are the consequences of the decontextualisation and recontextualisation of foreign texts, concepts, and authorial positions by the recipient culture.