Taiwan’s philosophical community was pleased and honored in January 1994 to host a series of lectures and seminars by Professor Richard Rorty as part of his continuing project to promote American pragmatisim to an international audience. The series consisted of three lectures at the Department of Philosophy, National Taiwan University; a lecture on philosophy of mind, delivered at National Chung Cheng University; and a pair of seminars on modernism and postmodernism in literary theory, held at National Taiwan University and at the Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica.

　　The first three chapters of this book are a revised and expanded version of the three lectures delivered at National Taiwan University on January 5, 7, and 10, 1994. Together, these lectures provide a fine epitome of Richard Rorty’s recent views on topics ranging from epistemology to metaphysics to ethics. For the publication of this volume, Professor Rorty has supplemented the lectures with a fourth chapter on relativism, which carefully distinguishes his neo-pragmatist vision from relativistic views with which it is sometimes conflated.