Paul Redding, Review of Randall E. Auxier, et al., THE PHILOSOPHY OF RICHARD RORTY. NDPR (March 2011).

Auxier, Randall E., and Lewis Edwin Hahn, eds.  The Philosophy of Richard Rorty.  Chicago: Open Court, 2010.

The Philosophy of Richard Rorty is the thirty-second volume in the Library of Living Philosophers series, which commenced with a volume on the philosopher with whom Rorty is most often compared, John Dewey. With this volume, the series title serves as a sad reminder of Rorty's death at the age of 75 in 2007, while the collection was still in preparation. For many who, like the reviewer, were in the early stages of a university career in philosophy at the time, the publication of Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature in 1979 was a very significant event indeed. I imagine that the attitude towards Rorty expressed by James Edwards in his contribution to the volume is far from unusual: "I am one of those who admire the work (and the man) almost without reservation; one of those who would not want to imagine what recent . . . philosophy would have been if Rorty had not been around to shake things up and to forge some unexpected linkages" (658). Of course not everyone, even from that particular generation, reacted to this work, and the stream of writings following it, with admiration. While many saw in Rorty a Socratic gadfly, to another wing of the profession he was closer to an ancient sophist. And even among those who do admire, admiration rarely means whole-hearted agreement -- many admirers still find troubling elements within Rorty's philosophy, as Edwards himself seems to.

With Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and the series of collections of essays that started with Consequence of Pragmatism in 1982, Rorty's thought-provoking ideas began to find a wide readership beyond the bounds of professional philosophy and started to attract the combination of applause and condemnation that has continued to this day. In fact, collections of critical essays on Rorty, similar in conception and format to the Library of Living Philosophers series, have been appearing on a reasonably regular basis since Alan Malachowski's Reading Rorty in 1990. Even omitting non-English language volumes and ones with very specific themes, such as one on "Rorty and Confucianism", there have been, on my count, seven prior to this volume. Of these, a number, like the Malachowski volume, have followed the LLP practice of having paired replies by Rorty to the interpretative and critical pieces. Both Malachowski's collection and the impressive 2000 volume edited by Robert Brandom, Rorty and His Critics, while large at around 400 pages each, are dwarfed by the LLP volume. With the standard introductory "Intellectual Autobiography", twenty-nine substantial essays, most with replies by Rorty, and an extensive bibliography of Rorty's writings, it is roughly the size of the other two combined. . . .

Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=23070.

Sperry, Elizabeth A. Review of Marianne Janack, ed. FEMINIST INTERPRETATIONS OF RICHARD RORTY. NDPR (March 2011).

Janack, Marianne, ed.  Feminist Interpretations of Richard Rorty.  University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2010.

(A) It is objectively true that women should not be oppressed.

(B) We must work to overcome the oppression of women.

Are A and B opposed? These claims undeniably represent a difference in emphasis, one seeking to describe reality and the other to alter it. But if feminist progress is best obtained on a non-foundationalist approach to truth, the difference between A and B is substantial. Richard Rorty argued that neo-pragmatism better advanced feminism's aims than did representationalist philosophical approaches, and Marianne Janack has collected ten essays that examine the import of those arguments. . . .

Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=22913.

Pub: Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo, AN ETHICS FOR TODAY.

Rorty, Richard, and Gianni Vattimo.  An Ethics for Today: Finding Common Ground Between Philosophy and Religion.  New York: Columbia UP, 2010.

Richard Rorty is famous, maybe even infamous, for his philosophical nonchalance. His groundbreaking work not only rejects all theories of truth but also dismisses modern epistemology and its preoccupation with knowledge and representation. At the same time, the celebrated pragmatist believed there could be no universally valid answers to moral questions, which led him to a complex view of religion rarely expressed in his writings.

In this posthumous publication, Rorty, a strict secularist, finds in the pragmatic thought of John Dewey, John Stuart Mill, Henry James, and George Santayana, among others, a political imagination shared by religious traditions. His intent is not to promote belief over nonbelief or to blur the distinction between religious and public domains. Rorty seeks only to locate patterns of similarity and difference so an ethics of decency and a politics of solidarity can rise. He particularly responds to Pope Benedict XVI and his campaign against the relativist vision. Whether holding theologians, metaphysicians, or political ideologues to account, Rorty remains steadfast in his opposition to absolute uniformity and its exploitation of political strength.

More information is available here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0231150563/ref=pe_5050_17403190_snp_dp.

Pub: Richard Rorty, THE RORTY READER.

Rorty, Richard.  The Rorty Reader.  Ed. Christopher J. Voparil and Richard J. Bernstein.  Oxford: Blackwell, 2010.

Preface.
Acknowledgments.
Source Acknowledgments.
Abbreviations.
General Introduction.

Part I: Toward Philosophy without Mirrors:

1. Introduction,The Linguistic Turn.
2. Dewey’s Metaphysics.
3. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: Introduction and Chapter VIII.
4. Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism.
5. Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism.

Part II: Conversations with Analytic Philosophy:

6. From Logic to Language to Play.
7. Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth.
8. Twenty-Five Years After.
9. Putnam and the Relativist Menace.
10. Analytic and Conversational Philosophy.

Part III: From Antirepresentationalism to Political Liberalism:

11. Philosophy as Science, as Metaphor, and as Politics.
12. Solidarity or Objectivity?
13. The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy.
14. Freud and Moral Reflection.
15. Private Irony and Liberal Hope.

Part IV: Pragmatism, Literature, and Democracy:

16. The Humanistic Intellectual: Eleven Theses.
17. Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens.
18. De Man and the American Cultural Left.
19. Feminism and Pragmatism.
20. Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality.
21. Looking Backwards from the Year 2096.
22. American National Pride: Whitman and Dewey.
23. Redemption from Egotism: James and Proust as Spiritual Exercises.

Part V: Philosophy as Cultural Politics:

24. Truth without Correspondence to Reality.
25. Ethics without Principles.
26. Justice as a Larger Loyalty.
27. Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism.
28. Religion in the Public Square: A Reconsideration.
29. Is “Cultural Recognition” a Useful Concept for Leftist Politics?
30. Philosophy as a Transitional Genre.

Part VI: Autobiographical:

31. From Philosophy to Post-Philosophy.
32. Trotsky and the Wild Orchids.
33. Biography and Philosophy.
34. The Fire of Life.

Guide to Further Reading.
Index.

Further information may be found here: http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1405198311.html.

"Neo-Pragmatism, Language and Culture: Perspectives on Rorty and Brandom," University of Oslo, October 28-29, 2010.

In connection with a visit of Professor Yajun Chen (Nanjing University), the Nordic Pragmatism Network and the University of Oslo will arrange a workshop on neo-pragmatism. The theme of the workshop is Richard Rorty’s and Robert Brandom’s views on world culture and language, emphasizing their commonalities and differences.

The main speaker of the workshop, Professor Chen, studied at Harvard, and has spent the last year as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Pittsburgh in collaboration with Robert Brandom. He is a distinguished representative of the growing revival of pragmatism in China, which already has important historical connections with the pragmatist tradition. Dewey spent two years in China at the beginning of the nineteen twenties, lectured to huge crowds, and had several pupils who survived the cultural revolution. Today there is a Dewey Centre in Shanghai. Eight decades later, Rorty also went to China (in 2004), for a visit which resulted, among other things, in the publication of Rorty, Pragmatism and Confucianism (edited by Yong Huang, SUNY Press, 2009).

The workshop is intended to provide an opportunity for ”learning by doing”, that is, the composing of articles/essays/books on the subject of the workshop: contributions may take the form of work in progress — even mere abstracts of forthcoming papers are welcome. Each speaker will be assigned 30 minutes including discussion. For those who might wish to participate in the program without presenting work, assignation as moderator or respondent is an option.

The organizers invite paper proposals to the workshop. Please send an abstract of 150-300 words to arild.pedersen@ifikk.uio.no by 1 August 2010.

Visit the conference website here: http://www.nordprag.org/ws10.html.

"Thirty Years After: Richard Rorty & the Mirror of Nature," Royal Holloway College & Institute of Philosophy, University of London, November 6, 2009.

Update: Download podcasts of the presentations here: http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2009/11/rorty-and-the-mirror-of-nature/. Original Post (April 10, 2009): Programme: 9.30 Registration & coffee 10.00 Bjorn Ramberg (Oslo), "For the sake of his own generation: Rorty on destruction and edification" -- Respondent/Chair: Neil Gascoigne (Royal Holloway) 11.30 Robert Brandom (Pittsburgh), "Global Anti-Representationalism?" -- Respondent/Chair: Tadeusz Szubka (Szczecinski) 1.00 Lunch (own arrangements) 2.30 Albrecht Wellmer (Berlin), Rereading Rorty (II) -- Respondent/Chair: Andrew Bowie (Royal Holloway) 4.00 Tea 4.30 Michael Williams (Johns Hopkins), "" -- Respondent/Chair: Mark Kalderon (UCL) 6.00 Close Further details are available at: http://www.philosophy.sas.ac.uk/Rorty.htm

Lee, Jung H. Review of Yong Huang, ed. RORTY, PRAGMATISM AND CONFUCIANISM. NDPR (September 2009).

Huang, Yong, ed. Rorty, Pragmatism, and Confucianism, with Responses by Richard Rorty. Albany: SUNY Press, 2009. The essays in this volume stem from a conference held on "Rorty, Pragmatism, and Chinese Philosophy" in Shanghai as the culminating event of Rorty's lecture tour of China in 2004. The selected papers include contributions on Rorty's views on epistemology, relativism, moral philosophy, human nature, religion, and socio-political philosophy. All of the essays attempt to weave Rorty's ideas into a conversation with Chinese philosophy in general and Confucian thinkers (most notably Confucius and Mencius) in particular. As the editor notes in his deft introduction, "some have found surprising similarities, while others notice unignorable differences; some try to use Confucianism to modify Rorty's ideas, while others try to appropriate Rorty's philosophy to update Confucianism" (2). The volume concludes with a sober set of responses by Rorty to his critics that gives pause to those who would wish to see Rorty as a latter day Confucian or, worse, see Confucius or Mencius as a former day Rortian. Although the quality of the essays is uneven at times, the work as a whole is a solid contribution in comparative philosophy and contemporary Confucian studies. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=17446.

Sperry, Elizabeth A. Review of Lorenzo Fabbri's THE DOMESTICATION OF DERRIDA. NDPR (April 2009).

Fabbri, Lorenzo. The Domestication of Derrida: Rorty, Pragmatism and Deconstruction. London: Continuum, 2008. Profound disagreement can be more comfortable for interested parties than a family resemblance between broadly similar approaches. Where there is a shared bloodline, more complete alignment seems within reach, if only the other side would wise up on a few details. Derrida and Rorty are just such philosophical siblings. Each appreciated the other, but expressed puzzlement at aspects of the other's work. The puzzlement was all the more vexing because seemingly irresolvable, despite Derrida's and Rorty's shared project of questioning philosophical absolutes. Lorenzo Fabbri passes judgment on this scene of sibling strife in The Domestication of Derrida: Rorty, Pragmatism and Deconstruction. Adjudicating a dispute over fine points requires care: it demands an accurate portrayal of each account and a thoughtful sifting of differences. Unfortunately, Fabbri routinely fails to demonstrate such care. Nevertheless, The Domestication of Derrida may prove useful to some non-Continental philosophers, given its accessible treatment of Derrida. Juxtaposing Derrida and Rorty enables Fabbri to piggyback some of Derrida's ideas on Rorty's, a device that could be helpful to American readers already familiar with Rorty. Fabbri sets himself three tasks: first, to explore areas of agreement between Derrida and Rorty; second, to present Rorty's failings as an interpreter of Derrida; and third, to expose Rorty's own philosophical shortcomings. Fabbri's title initially suggests a primary focus on Derrida, but in fact Fabbri is largely occupied with assessing Rorty. This is no bait and switch: it makes perfect sense given Derrida's and Rorty's overlapping intellectual territory. Fabbri writes in a continental style, as befits a monograph in the Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy Series. While pursuing his three aims, Fabbri expostulates on Benjamin, Harold Bloom, De Man, Foucault, Habermas, Hegel, Heidegger, Husserl, Kant, and Nietzsche. Analytic philosophers might consider these discussions to be unfocussed digressions; continental philosophers may see them as interesting intellectual back-story. Still, it is surprising that a book announcing Rorty's shortcomings finds so much time and space for so many other thinkers, when so little time and space is devoted to independent textual analysis of Rorty's oeuvre. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=15867.

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.

Bragues, George. "Richard Rorty's Postmodern Case for Liberal Democracy a Critique." HUMANITAS 19.1-2 (2006).

Liberal democracy was originally founded on the Enlightenment notion that there are principles, accessible to unassisted reason, demonstrating that political life should be dedicated to the protection of rights common to all human beings. These were thought to include the right to life, property, free speech, equal standing before the law, due process in criminal proceedings, along with the right to practice the religion of one’s choice. Not to mention the right to choose one’s political leaders, and pursue one’s own conception of happiness so long as the choices made are consistent with the rights of others and the common good. Our Enlightenment ancestors may have given different justificationsfor these rights—some grounding them on a deistic conception of God or nature, others on the rational dignity of human beings, and still others on social utility considerations—but they generally agreed that they were best secured by one variant or another of liberal democracy: which is to say, the combination of a politics free from the scheming of religious sects, representative institutions with separated powers regulated by checks and balances, and a commercial economic order, all of it operating within the framework of the rule of law. Today, however, it is widely held that no objective framework exists to decide normative and factual judgments. All such judgments are said to reflect the political, cultural, and socio-economic imperatives of the particular time and place in which they are made. This view has been christened postmodernism. . . . Download the paper here: http://www.nhinet.org/bragues19-1.pdf.

Pub: 30th Anniversary Edition of Rorty's PHILOSOPHY AND THE MIRROR OF NATURE (2009).

Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979. For more information, visit: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691141320/ref=pe_5050_10964430_pe_snp_320.

Allen, Barry. "Review of Neil Gross' RICHARD RORTY." NDPR (October 2008).

Gross, Neil. Richard Rorty: the Making of an American Philosopher, 1931-1982. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. This book is neither a biography nor a critical study of Rorty's ideas. It has very substantial biographical portions, but in intention it differs from either biography or philosophical study. The book is a contribution to the sociology of ideas, and proposes to "use Rorty's biography as a case study by means of which to push the sociology of ideas in new directions." Neil Gross is mainly interested in the early part of Rorty's career, the work that first drew him to the world's attention. The biography ends in 1982, with Rorty's departure from Princeton. . . . Gross wants us to think of his book as a contribution to a "new" sociology of ideas. The old sociology attempts to deduce the individual from the group, regarding a thinker's ideas as an unconscious expression of a prevailing structure, whether of economy, ideology, or libido.The new sociology of ideas, as I gather from Gross’s book, is a theory of the influences operating on intellectual choice, especially in the humanities. The leading contributions to this new sociology all make sociological studies of philosophy and philosophers -- Pierre Bourdieu in Homo Academicus and a book on Heidegger; Randall Collins in The Sociology of Philosophies, and now Gross’s book. The goal is a theory of the social factors that influence the ideas intellectuals take seriously and how they manage their careers. There is no expectation of uncovering general laws, but Gross believes there are "social mechanisms" to be found that probablize outcomes.For Bourdieu, ideas are strategic; preference for ideas is one way people distinguish and position themselves in an academic hierarchy. For Collins, access to high-status networks is the key intellectual resource and major determinate of why "great thinkers" think as they do. Gross' contribution is to assert the influence of intellectual self-concept, the quest for self-concept coherence. In other words philosophers sometimes argue as they do because of their beliefs about who they are and what they want to accomplish. They gravitate toward ideas that synthesize the stories they tell others about who they are and their theoretical expressions. On this account the causes for our taking seriously the ideas we do are not all behind our backs, as Bourdieu and Collins, like Marx and Freud, say. Individuals matter, consciousness matters, the self matters. Very reassuring, romantic, and American. The new sociology confirms the old ideology. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14405.

Greif, Mark. "The Corrupter of Youth." THE AMERICAN PROSPECT September 19, 2008.

Gross, Neil. Richard Rorty: the Making of an American Philosopher, 1931-1982. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. By the last years of the 20th century, Richard Rorty was probably the best-known university-based philosopher in the United States. In recent years he has been surpassed in notoriety by the utilitarian ethicist Peter Singer, known for his advocacy of animal rights and the acceptability of euthanizing severely disabled newborns. Rorty, in his time, was accused of murdering truth. He argued the position that there was no standpoint outside of human descriptions of the world from which to decide that any one view was false and another true. There were only descriptions in more or less convincing language, with more or less convincing uses, by which people might persuade one another how to live in the world. Read the rest here: http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_corrupter_of_youth_08.

Wellmer, Albrecht. "Rereading Rorty." KRISIS 28.2 (2008).

When as a young philosopher, equally fascinated by Critical Theory and analytical philosophy, I first encountered Richard Rorty and began to read some of his writings, I was mostly struck by what I perceived as a certain frivolity of his manner of speaking and writing, that is, by what appeared to me then as a certain lack of seriousness concerning deep phi-losophical problems. When I think about Rorty today what comes first to my mind is that through his interventions in almost all important philosophical debates of the recent past – from the various spectres of ana-lytical philosophy to the most recent developments of continental philosophy – he has changed the parameters of contemporary philosophical discourse in a highly significant way. He has done this by reshuffling most of the important philosophical posi-tions of the past and the present in an ingenious way and thereby redrawing whatever has been one of the established current ‘maps’ of philosophical positions – in a way which most likely has irritated the occupants of each one of them. To put it differently: Rorty has exploited philosophical schools and traditions which before seemed incompatible and inimical to each other by playing them off against each other and using them to recontextualize them in a new way: Hegel, Dewey, Habermas, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Quine, Davidson, Derrida, Foucault, to name only some of the most important ones, not to speak of Plato or of early European rationalist and empiricist philosophers. The result is an entirely new way to conceive of the philosophical tradition as well as of the liberal culture of the North Atlantic tradition, concerning not least the possible role which philosophy could play within this culture. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.krisis.eu/content/2008-2/2008-2-01-wellmer.pdf.

Fyffe, Richard. "Conversational Constraints: Richard Rorty and Contemporary Critical Theory." ACRL (January 1996).

Rorty's own work be read as an attempt to introduce the vocabulary of what he calls a post-philosophical culture to replace the "objective" ideals of science and Philosophy. Such a culture, he says, would be thoroughly literary -- erasing C.P. Snow's famous split between science and literature. Rorty characterizes this culture as one in which "neither the priests nor the physicists nor the poets nor the Party were thought of as more 'rational' or more 'scientific' or 'deeper' than ... another. No particular portion of culture would be singled out as exemplifying (or signally failing to exemplify) the condition to which the rest aspired." (COP xxxviii). "A post-Philosophical culture, then, would be one in which men and women felt themselves alone, merely finite, with no links to something Beyond. . . . [It would not] erect Science as an idol to fill the place once held by God. It views science as one genre of literature -- or, put the other way around, literature and the arts as inquiries, on the same footing as scientific inquiries" (COP xlii-xliii). Post- Philosophical culture, Rorty concludes, thus amounts to "a study of the comparative advantages and disadvantages of the various ways of talking which our race has invented. It looks, in short, much like what is sometimes called 'culture criticism'" (COP xl). . . . Read the rest here: http://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/dspace/bitstream/1808/972/1/Conversational%20Constraints%20ALA.pdf.

Rée, Jonathan. "Remembering Rorty." PROSPECT MAGAZINE 136 (July 2007).

In The Linguistic Turn, Rorty observed that if philosophy could give up its claims to be a modern, scientific discipline, then it would be able to move on to a “post-philosophical phase,” throwing away the cumbersome baggage of “pseudo-scientific argumentation” and reinventing itself as a “new art form.” In his most famous book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), he stepped up to the plate, proposing that philosophy should be seen not as a hotline to Truth about the World but as a loose literary tradition which might from time to time provide the public with new metaphors to live by, or new stories for articulating the past or imagining the future. He was thus able to extend a hand of friendship to the kind of “continental philosophers” who had always been anathema to his colleagues; but then he made new enemies because the admirers of Heidegger, Gadamer and Derrida were not pleased to have their heroes bundled up with loose-talking American pragmatists who had given up on the idea of a shining path to truth. Rorty’s disenchantment with hard-edged scientism led him not only to the sorts of thinkers that most professional philosophers dislike, but also to a kind of politics that they found equally unpalatable. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=9692.

Thompson, Simon. "Richard Rorty: the Making of an American Philosopher." TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION July 10, 2008.

Gross, Neil. Richard Rorty: the Making of an American Philosopher, 1931-1982. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. This book is a curious hybrid. One part is a relatively orthodox intellectual biography of Richard Rorty. It begins with accounts of his parents' intellectual interests and political commitments, then moves chapter by chapter from Rorty's undergraduate and masters degrees at Chicago, through his doctoral studies at Yale, to his first academic position at Wellesley College, and then to his time at Princeton, before taking up an interdisciplinary professorship at Virginia. The narrative ends with the publication of Rorty's collection of essays, Consequences of Pragmatism, in 1982. This part of the book is interesting for several reasons. Perhaps, most importantly, it counters the widely held view that Rorty began as an analytic philosopher and then defected to the pragmatist camp. In fact, as Neil Gross shows, Rorty was always sympathetic to pragmatist ideas, and in most of his work on analytic philosophy sought to demonstrate the desirability of dialogue between the analytic and pragmatist traditions. The other part of the book is an attempt to make a contribution to a "new sociology of ideas", one that in particular seeks to understand "some of the social processes that intellectuals encounter and navigate as they develop their ideas". In this part of the book, Gross provides an account of the work of Pierre Bourdieu on academic sociology (Homo Academicus) and Randall Collins on the sociology of philosophies. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=402680&c=1.

Rorty, Richard. "Deconstructionist Theory." FROM FORMALISM TO POSTSTRUCTURALISM. Vol. 8 CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM. Cambridge: CUP, 1995.

Most of Derrida’s work continues a line of thought which begins with Friedrich Nietzsche and runs through Martin Heidegger. This line of thought is characterized by an ever more radical repudiation of Platonism of the apparatus of philosophical distinctions which the West inherited from Plato and which has dominated European thought. In a memorable passage in The Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche describes ‘how the “true world” became a fable.’ There he sketches an account of the gradual dissolution of the other-worldy way of thinking common to Plato, to Christianity, and to Kant, the way of thinking which contrasts the True World of Reality with the World of Appearance created by the senses, or matter, or Sin, or the structure of the human understanding. The characteristic expressions of this other-worldliness, this attempt to escape from time and history into eternity, are what deconstructionists often call ‘the traditional binary oppositions’: true–false, original–derivative, unified–diverse, objective–subjective, and so on. . . . Read the rest here: http://themiddleeastinterest.wordpress.com/2008/07/01/deconstructionist-theory/.

Anon. "Bored by Philosophy." ECONOMIST June 12, 2008.

Gross, Neil. Richard Rorty: the Making of an American Philosopher, 1931-1982. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. RICHARD RORTY, who died last year at 75, was one of the most talked-about thinkers in America. Every professional philosopher in the English-speaking world had to grapple with his magnum opus, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, published in 1979. But the reason why he was a superstar is that it was not only philosophers who read him. Students and teachers in many other branches of the humanities fell under his spell. This wide appeal was partly due to his approachable style, trenchant polemics and breadth of learning. It also helped that he attacked philosophy as a puffed-up pretender with no monopoly on deep truths. . . . Read the whole article here: http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11546067.

Paparella, Emanuel L. "Richard Rorty's Unflinching Critique of Modern Western Philosophy." OVI MAGAZINE May 19, 2008.

While writing a Ph.D. dissertation at Yale University on immanence and transcendence in Giambattista Vico’s concept of Providence I serendipitously discovered the late Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). What first attracted my attention to that particular book was Rorty’s rejection of the Cartesian mind-body split with which Vico’s too begins his New Science. To be sure he had already written another important book in 1967 titled The Linguistic Turn in which he had introduced a skeptical attitude about the nature and place of philosophical enquiry while remaining within the field of analytic philosophy, but here was a courageous critique of analytic philosophy and by implication of the role and importance of traditional philosophy in modern culture. That book eventually was seen as Rorty’s most important work in which he dismisses Cartesian representationalism, the notion that the mind reflects some objective reality outside itself. Philosophy is only important for pragmatic reasons, for how useful it is in helping a culture achieve its aims. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.ovimagazine.com/art/3041?PHPSESSID=94fed49588121c3d01a37356810cf036.