Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is a 1989 book by the American philosopher Richard Rorty, based on two sets of lectures he gave at University College, London, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. In contrast to his earlier work, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Rorty mostly abandons attempts to explain his theories in analytical terms and creates an alternate conceptual schema to that of the "Platonists" he rejects, in which "truth" (as the term is used conventionally) is considered unintelligible and meaningless.