Pursuit of happiness e speranza post-moderna. Rorty su Havel, Patočka (e oltre)

In this paper I examine Rorty’s article The Seer of Prague, in which He reflects on Václav Havel’s speech at the US Congress – February the 21th, 1990 – and analyzes Havel’s approach to politics in the light of Martin Heidegger’s and Jan Patočka’s Philosophy. Rorty appreciated Havel’s and Patočka’s engagement in defense of democracy and civil rights in Seventies’ Czechoslovakia (Cahrter77), despite He criticizes their philosophical aptitude as a political task. On the one hand, I try to argue that Rorty’s claim about freeing liberal-democracy from the problem of metaphysical foundation – as a matter of private life of the philosopher – is incoherent; on the other hand, I try to enhance Rorty’s distributive justice argument (in Achieving our Country) in the light of nowadays populist’s challenge to liberal democracy.