Frazier, Brad. Review of Neil Gross' RICHARD RORTY: THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHER. MOR January 27, 2009.

Gross, Neil. Richard Rorty: the Making of an American Philosopher, 1931-1982. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. Neil Gross's study of Rorty's life and thought offers many occasions to ponder and better understand how Rorty made his way to that (humanities) post at UVA, after becoming a rock star of analytic philosophy while at Princeton, and why he would have recommended to a lowly graduate student at another university a book of a former student. It is an aptly timed work, given Rorty's recent passing, and worthy of the generous, complicated, and brilliant person that Rorty was. Now for the provisos, which are especially important for philosophers who might read this book. Gross offers a kind of biography--which concludes with Rorty's move to UVA--but for the primary purpose of developing "a new theory about the social influences on intellectual choice, particularly for humanists--that is, a theory about the social factors that lead them to fasten onto one idea, or set of ideas, rather than another, during turning points in their intellectual careers" (xi). Gross labels his account a theory of "intellectual self-concept" and explicates it in two late chapters only after a thoroughly researched, careful and engaging discussion of Rorty's life and intellectual journey culminating in his departure from Princeton. Rorty turns out to be a particularly good case study for developing this theory. Philosophers (and other non-sociologists) may find Gross's project in the sociology of ideas interesting on its own terms, as I did, as it gets at profound questions about the production of ideas, the social bases of knowledge, and how the experience of being a non-tenured, junior professor in humanities disciplines tends to be a more stultifying, less creative time than it should be--not to mention implications of Gross's work for the study of the history of philosophy. Even so, philosophers and other readers who are mainly interested in learning more about Rorty's life and its relation to his thought will not be disappointed--except that Rorty's years at UVA and Stanford and the circumstances concerning his death (from pancreatic cancer) are not discussed. Gross glosses this omission as a greater interest in the development of Rorty's ideas "rather than their diffusion" and, more generally, in "the social processes that shape the production of knowledge by academicians in the years before they become eminent scholars in their fields" (27). Fair enough, but Rorty's thought continued to develop in significant ways after he left Princeton. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity came out in 1989, after all--roughly seven years after he left Princeton. Furthermore, Rorty's poignant late essay, "The Fire of Life," published in Poetry in November 2007, in which Rorty laments not having spent "somewhat more" of his life "with verse," is ripe for discussion for any biographer of Rorty, no matter her or his broader purposes. (A psychoanalytic biographer could not have resisted this material, since Rorty's father was a poet.) Better for Gross just to concede that his project would have been unmanageable if he had treated Rorty's entire career, rather than to signal that Rorty's development as a thinker mostly stopped when he finally moved on from Princeton. . . . Read the rest here: http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=4695.