There is a sense in which Richard Rorty is an unlikely fellow-traveler for philosophers of education, insofar as he warned against the risk of over-philosophizing education (Rorty, 1990). Adapting one of Rorty’s most famous phrases (Rorty, 1991b) his only possible merit towards educationalists would be the fact of inviting us to consider the priority of education to philosophy. That having been said, none of this has stopped many philosophers of education to consider Rorty a particularly timely thinker (also) within the framework of philosophy of education. The attention Rorty’s legacy has drawn in our field has revolved around two main aspects of his work. First, his lifelong endeavor to smoke out the relics of the Platonic passion for Truth and objectivity, that is, for the identification of underlying structures, essences, and invariant criteria or standards wherever they lurk, could work as a much welcome antidote to modern discourse of evidence-based education and as an encouragement to devise other vocabularies to make sense of the educational undertaking. And second, Rorty’s readiness to spot the perils intrinsic in the “radical critique” (Rorty, 1991c) of the French postmodern philosophy, more specifically that of indulging in a hopeless (when not fairly aridly desperate) exercise of critique –while keeping himself conversant and even sympathetic with the postmodern philosophical discourse.

What this symposium would like to explore instead, is Rorty’s legacy for philosophy of education by addressing his vocabularies of hope. First, we will explore Rorty’s invitation to use a vocabulary of hope instead of a vocabulary of scientific knowledge understood as the all too modern pursuit of what Stephen Toulmin (2001) has called the Myth of Stability, that is, the fatal conceit of being able to reach a final and absolutely founded description of reality. And second, we will look at Rorty’s invitation to switch from a vocabulary of critique, understood not as the valuable endeavor to help people “to modify [their] sense of who they are, what matters to them, what is most important” (Rorty, 2007, ix) but as a substantial negative attitude that risks denouncing the injustices of our social world with an arid impassibility, to a vocabulary of hope.

The Rorty to be discussed here would join his philosophical hero –John Dewey– less in the latter’s view of philosophy as “the general theory of education; the theory of which education is the corresponding art or practice” (Dewey, p. 303; see also Dewey, 1980, 338) than as “not in any sense whatever a form of knowledge [but rather] a social hope reduced to a working program of action, a prophecy of the future” (Dewey, 1982, 43).

In this redescription or, to put it more humbly, in this re-reading of the meaning of Rorty’s legacy, the authors have encountered the recent proposal of a turn towards post-critical pedagogy in philosophy of education (Hodgson, Vlieghe, & Zamojski, 2017) as a significant dialogue-partner, especially for the role that the post-critical stance assigns to hope. In this horizon, the argumentative trajectory of the symposium develops also as an increasingly more detailed engagement with the post-critical perspective. After exploring the potential of Rorty’s lesson to frame a philosophical discourse about education which recognizes frailty and weakness and has hope as its pivot, the first paper indicates the possibility of establishing a dialogue with post-critical pedagogy. The second paper takes the baton from this point and proposes a Rorty re-interpretation of the very project of post-critical pedagogy in terms of a “poetic practice”. Finally, without gainsaying the relevant differences, the third paper investigates three possible “elective affinities” between post-critical pedagogy and a Rortyan stance.

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