Robbins Library Notes

At left: Richard Rorty (1931-2007)

Richard Rorty was one of the most influential figures in American philosophy during the latter part of the twentieth century. As Bjørn Ramberg writes in the introduction to the entry on Rorty in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Rorty

…developed a distinctive and controversial brand of pragmatism that expressed itself along two main axes. One is negative—a critical diagnosis of what Rorty takes to be defining projects of modern philosophy. The other is positive—an attempt to show what intellectual culture might look like, once we free ourselves from the governing metaphors of mind and knowledge in which the traditional problems of epistemology and metaphysics (and indeed, in Rorty’s view, the self-conception of modern philosophy) are rooted. The centerpiece of Rorty’s critique is the provocative account offered in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979, hereafter PMN). In this book, and in the closely related essays collected in Consequences of Pragmatism (1982, hereafter CP), Rorty’s principal target is the philosophical idea of knowledge as representation, as a mental mirroring of a mind-external world. Providing a contrasting image of philosophy, Rorty has sought to integrate and apply the milestone achievements of Dewey, Hegel and Darwin in a pragmatist synthesis of historicism and naturalism. … In [his] writings, ranging over an unusually wide intellectual territory, Rorty offers a highly integrated, multifaceted view of thought, culture, and politics, a view that has made him one of the most widely discussed philosophers in our time.

(Those who are curious about Rorty should definitely the rest of Ramberg’s entry.)

I’m writing about Rorty today in light of two recent links on Bookforum.com. The first is an interview of Neil Gross by Scott McLemee in InsideHigherEd.com. Gross is the author of the soon-to-be published Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher. The second link is an excerpt from the introduction of Gross’ book.