When I first encountered Richard Rorty in his classes at Princeton, I was amazed at his breadth of knowledge of philosophy. His introductory lecture to a course on the Philosophy of Mind in 1967 was an expert tour through the entire history of philosophy. He seemed to know everything about the history and practice of philosophy. He was able to draw connections between disparate philosophers in entirely new ways. He was an inspiration.
Later on I realized that his breadth and depth of knowledge not only included all of philosophy but also extended to literature, literary theory, political theory, and the humanities generally. I should say that he was always, personally, a mentor and friend from whom I learned a great deal. Richard Rorty was one of the two (along with Donald Davidson) most important figures in my intellectual life.
When it comes to academia our era is characterized by increasing narrowness and specialization. Whereas Descartes made contributions to mathematics, optics, and metaphysics, and Kant proposed hypotheses on the origin of the solar system, as well as writing on metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics, and political philosophy, most contemporary philosophers and humanists are specialists in ever-narrowing subfields of their disciplines. It is a rare English professor who publishes books and essays on Chaucer, for instance, and also publishes on any other figure whatsoever. English professors are known as “Miltonists” or “Romanticists.” In philosophy, an entire successful career can consist of essays and books about Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Epistemology, like other branches of philosophy, is much too broad a field for young scholars these days, since the literature on any of its subdivisions is too vast to be mastered before they must start publishing their own work.
Richard Rorty was an inspiration to those of us who felt and continue to feel that the ability to make connections among disparate disciplines and fields is an important part of intellectual existence. “If Dick can understand and assimilate political theory, literature, and all of philosophy, maybe I can, also,” was the thought that occurred at least to some of his students and followers who resisted the narrowing down of intellectual scope that specialization entails.
The contributors to this Special Issue of The European Legacy are thinkers who cross boundaries within their own disciplines and between different disciplines. Even though in many cases the authors take issue with Rorty’s positions, they all seem to me to be on his side in conceiving of the intellectual’s role as not just that of getting increasingly detailed knowledge of, say, the various ways of dealing with the Sorites paradox or the variety of understandings of Plato’s Republic. How broad a spectrum of interest is appropriate for an intellectual varies. There is a role for someone who knows absolutely everything about Plato’s Republic and writes about nothing else. But there is also a role for philosophers who are public intellectuals. For instance, one of our contributors, Michael P. Lynch, is an active participant in the political debate about the proper role of government intelligence. All of our contributors are more than solipsistic specialists.
In commissioning and sorting the essays submitted for this Special Issue, I have tried to reflect the breadth of Dick’s knowledge of and influence on a variety of fields, from philosophy proper through literary theory, aesthetics, and political theory. This Issue consists of a varied array of essays, responding to Rorty’s thought from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The essays fall into three groups, though for some of the essays, the categorization is somewhat arbitrary. In broad terms, all of them are philosophical: The first three essays are by philosophers writing on philosophical topics that do not obviously relate to any other particular discipline. All three contributors, Bjorn Ramberg, Paul Redding, and Michael P. Lynch, are, like Richard Rorty, philosophers with wide-ranging interests reaching across the analytic-continental divide.
Ramberg’s “Irony’s Commitment: Reading Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity” is a reformulation and modification of Rorty’s concept of irony as an alternative to liberalism. The very coherence of Rorty’s conception has rightly come under attack—Rorty’s ironist appears to amount to a kind of relativist. Ramberg examines this problem in detail and suggests a conception of irony that captures what Rorty might have wanted to say.
Arguably, the core of Rorty’s pragmatism is the view that truth is not a relation of sentences to the world, but rather truth is relative to a culture’s practices of acceptance. Lynch’s “Truth and Freedom” defends his moderate “truth as a substantive property” view. This essay is another chapter in his debate with Rorty on the nature and importance of truth. Lynch’s present contribution continues that discussion in the light of his own further work on the topic, sadly without Dick being available to respond.
Paul Redding’s “Rorty, Brandom, and Truths about Photons” explores a central rift between Rorty’s pragmatism and Robert Brandom’s version. Redding’s discussion ranges from Kant to Sellars, Kripke, Stalnaker, and David Lewis, centering on how we should understand modal claims. Redding argues that Brandom’s inferentialist account of modality commits him to a metaphysics of truth-makers that Rorty’s purer version of pragmatism manages to avoid.
Rorty’s later work was much involved with political philosophy and political theory. The essays by Alan Malachowski and by Giorgio Baruchello and Ralph Weber dwell on the connections between Rorty’s political views and his philosophical views. Malachowski shows that Rorty’s disdain for the “science” of ontology is continuous with his conception of making philosophy relevant to current reality. “Ontology” as a science that is somehow prior to physics and common sense, was according to Rorty, not only silly but a way of making philosophy utterly irrelevant to anything else in the culture.
Baruchello and Weber, in “‘Who Are We?’ On Rorty, Rhetoric, and Politics,” defend Rorty’s use of “we” against the many criticisms it has given rise to by offering a nuanced interpretation of his “ethnocentrism,” which renders it not only palatable but admirable.
Rorty took the Philosophy of Art and the Philosophy of Culture to be central to what philosophers should be doing, rather than assigning to them a marginal status, as contemporary analytic philosophy does. More concretely, he reviewed poetry for journals like the London Review of Books. Literary theorists and cultural writers took Rorty to be one of their own. The essays by William M. Hawley, Kalle Puolakka, and Filomena Vasconcelos address his work in these fields. Hawley’s “Rorty’s Virtuous Ambivalence toward Art” explores the tension between Rorty’s aesthetic theory and his evaluations of actual works. Rorty’s view that art should serve the common good places him in an interesting relationship with Plato, who likewise held art to have, in his sense, a primarily progressive role.
Kalle Puolakka’s “Pragmatist Cultural Naturalism: Dewey and Rorty” develops a naturalistic view of the emergence of culture, starting with Rorty’s view of metaphor and its cultural significance, and continuing with a discussion of Rorty’s and Dewey’s critiques of idealism’s inability to give a credible account of culture.
Finally, Vasconselos’s “Rorty’s Anti-representationalism and Poe’s Poetics” draws an interesting parallel between Rorty’s philosophical pragmatism and Edgar Allan Poe’s aesthetic pragmatism. Both reject eternal ideals of truth and of beauty, respectively, in favor of putting philosophy and art in contact with the real world.
The present collection of essays, in sum, seeks to illuminate and to celebrate both the diversity and the depth of Richard Rorty’s legacy.