The Ironic Politics of Richard Rorty
developments within the field of philosophy in recent years, and the implications of those developments for political thought and practice, might do well to begin with the works of Richard Rorty.' Rorty's writings do a great deal to clarify and synthesize themes from a wide range of important thinkers, including Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Habermas, Dewey, and Kuhn. Since much of his work consists of attempts to locate and explain his own writings in reference to these other thinkers, it provides a reference point from which to map current disputes within the postmodern movement.2 Also, Rorty's self-consciously American range of allusions and his jargon-free writing style make him more accessible to many than the works of continental philosophers. The attempt to understand Rorty's thinking does, however, present certain difficulties, despite his use of clear, even blunt language. Certain of his political views, for instance, carry connotations of human nature and natural rights which seem incompatible with his overall anti-essentialist outlook. A related difficulty is the question of whether Rorty's own writings reflect the sort of rhetorical strategies which, he argues, should replace the rigid and universalistic logics of traditional philosophy. Since Rorty's recent books consist of articles and lectures composed throughout the 1980s for various purposes, I shall attempt in this essay to provide a systematic outline of Rorty's major themes.3 In the first section I shall explore his views of reality and science, self and society, including his response to charges of "relativity" as self-refuting
`Exorcismus Theoriae':
Recently, concerns have been raised among a growing and diverse group of IR theorists that the basic concepts and categories we employ to describe, interpret and explain the world around us are no longer useful or illuminating. There is a sense, in other words, that the discipline's predominant way-of-seeing the world — what some have called a state-centric/billiard-ball bias — has become a kind of ontological blinder. This article addresses the question of how we go about shedding this blinder. The main argument is that the prevailing epistemology that underpins mainstream theorizing in the field (referred to in the article as the spectator theory of knowledge) works against such a liberation. The article puts forward an alternative epistemology, called philosophical holism, and distinguishes its main strands. It then describes a method (called therapeutic redescription) that is derived from the American pragmatic strand of this epistemology, and in particular from the work of the pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty. The article argues that this method can help theorists break free from the conceptual blinders that hold them captive. The final section of the article illustrates how this method could be used in conjunction with recent allusions in the field to neo-medievalism or a new medievalism.
Botulinum toxin in the management of chronic migraine: clinical evidence and experience
Chronic migraine (CM) is a severely disabling neurological condition characterized by episodes of pulsating unilateral or bilateral headache. The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved onabotulinumtoxinA (Botox®) for the prophylactic treatment of CM in 2010. It has been shown that onabotulinumtoxinA is effective in the reduction of headache frequency and severity in patients with CM. Treatment is well tolerated by the patients. This review reports on the history of botulinum neurotoxin (BoNT) in CM and presents the current clinical evidence for the use of onabotulinumtoxinA in the treatment of CM.