Richard Rorty RIP

His best book, and one of the few books on critical theory I still enjoy. RIP indeed.

here's the link: http://www.telospress.com/main/index.php?main_page=news_article&article_id=188

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^

this makes me sad. i wrote my dissertation on him last year, his work has had such an effect on me. i'm not sure i've read anyone who could write with such hope, who truly belived that the human race could become whatever it imagined. that was the thing, once we let go of the old stories we can create better ones, fairer ones. a book of his essays came out last year, i wondered why they were billing it as his last, i thought he might be retiring. RIP

RIP Mr. Rorty.

Achieving Our Country had a profound affect on my life a few years ago. It made me rethink a lot of the "critical" suppositions that radical professors & activist friends had hammered into me. It took me away from aimless radicals and thrust me back into real life. For that alone I couldn't appreciate his work enough.

RIP Rorty

whats his rep in the mainstream academic community

i wouldnt know how to find that out, but i get the feeling he was disliked by radicals and conservatives equally...but then any good philosopher wold be. he was a staunch enlightenment liberal and always attempted to reconcile that preference with a anti-foundationalist epistemology.

to my mind he was pretty mainstream and well liked. the 'scientistic'ally minded and radical political types didn't buy his anti-realism as they find it defeatist rather than 'pragmatic'. (anti foundationalism finds favour all over - i guess he is popularly seen as its champion.)

he was good at pissing off people on both extreme wings, which is always a good trick

he is probably the most controversial, shit was, the most controversial figure in modern ananlytic philosophy. he was only one step away from the unspeakable stuff. he showed that you could read derrida and quine and reach the same point. that you could read heidegger and the postivists, nabokov and orwell... this of course annoyed a lot of people.

I remember being annoyed by him immensely during my post-structuralist heavy undergrad days. However, in the intervening 12 years or so, I've shed a lot of the arrogance of youth. I should really pull out my copies of Contingency and Philosophy and Mirror of Nature again. I'm going to guess I'd be a lot more open to them at this point in my life.

RIP.

Instead of trying to define the essence of human nature, Rorty thought we should creatively think up new possibilities for ourselves -- what to be, how to live. He said we are not hostage to how things are. He spoke of pragmatism as a future-oriented philosophy.

“I know,” Rorty responded dryly. “I'm still trying to figure that out.”

“He rescued philosophy from its analytic constraints” and returned it “to core concerns of how we as a people, a country and humanity live in a political community.”

ah, just saw this. RIP, you great modern philosopher.

http://www.slate.com/id/2168488/

Ugh!!!

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/18/arts/18conn.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=arts&pagewanted=all

One tendency of pragmatism might be to so focus on the ways in which one’s own worldview is flawed that trauma is more readily attributed to internal failure than to external challenges. In one of his last interviews Mr. Rorty recalled the events of 9/11: “When I heard the news about the twin towers, my first thought was: ‘Oh, God. Bush will use this the way Hitler used the Reichstag fire.’ ”

If that really was his first thought, it reflects a certain amount of reluctance to comprehend forces lying beyond the boundaries of his familiar world, an inability fully to imagine what confrontations over truth might look like, possibly even a resistance to stepping outside of one’s skin or mental habits.

I think a good chunk of ILX made the same comparison at the time.

Sure, it was the first thought that came into my head too. And obviously, it was the right thought to have. Nice how this story disses Rorty for displaying historical perspective in a heated moment, like he was supposed to be all "OMG! Kill 'em all!"

Oh, and "If that really was his first thought..." Gargh!

I just read "Contingency, Irony & Solidarity" recently, as an almost total layman in philosophy I found it endlessly stimulating and adventurous. And yeah, the guy's *hope* just kept shining through. RIP.

I registered for NYTimes to read that article, dude hasn't quite got a grasp on Rortian pragmatism. Mainly one of the most difficult bit, his strain of Ethnocentrism:

From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

3.3 Ethnocentrism

Rorty's liberal ironist, recognizing—indeed, affirming—the contingency of her own commitments, is explicitly ethnocentric. (ORT "Solidarity or Objectivity") For the liberal ironist,
…one consequence of antirepresentationalism is the recognition that no description of how things are from a God's-eye point of view, no skyhook provided by some contemporary or yet-to-be-developed science, is going to free us from the contingency of having been acculturated as we were. Our acculturation is what makes certain options live, or momentous, or forced, while leaving others dead, or trivial, or optional. (ORT 13)
So the liberal ironist accepts that bourgeois liberalism has no universality other than the transient and unstable one which time, luck, and discursive effort might win for it. This view looks to many readers like a version of cultural relativism. True, Rorty does not say that what is true, what is good, and what is right is relative to some particular ethnos, and so in that sense he is no relativist. But the worry about relativism, that it leaves us with no rational way to adjudicate conflict, seems to apply equally to Rorty's ethnocentric view. Rorty's answer is to say that in one sense of "rational" that is true, but that in another sense it is not, and to recommend that we drop the former. Rorty's position is that we have no notion of rational warrant that exceeds, or transcends, or grounds, the norms that liberal intellectuals take to define thorough, open-minded, reflective discussion. It is chimerical, Rorty holds, to think that the force or attractiveness of these norms can be enhanced by argument that does not presuppose them. It is pointless, equally, to look for ways of convicting those who pay them no heed of irrationality. Persuasion across such fundamental differences is achieved, if at all, by concrete comparisons of particular alternatives, by elaborate description and redescription of the kinds of life to which different practices conduce.