It’s been interesting seeing the eulogizing of Richard Rorty after his passing away on Friday. As one might have expected, the philosopher who was dismissed as crazy (at least by most philosophers) before his death, seems to have become upon his death a leading philosopher with whom we must grapple. The Maverick Philosopher provides a perhaps more honest note.
Most of the newspaper obituaries point out that Rorty’s ‘work was read not just in philosophy departments but also in classes on literature and political theory’. It might be more accurate to say that his work was read in literature and social science departments and occasionally by philosophers as well.
The most interesting tidbit comes from Russell A. Berman of Stanford who notes that Rorty ‘rescued philosophy from its analytic constraints’. Really? I thought most Anglo-American philosophers working currently identified themselves as analytic philosophers and proudly so. Continental Europe has traditionally been a bastion of other kinds of philosophizing, but I thought that even there more and more people were turning to analytic philosophy. Perhaps Berman uses ‘analytic’ in its older, narrower sense to refer to philosophers of the persuasion of Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore. In that case, it would probably be true that most philosophers are no longer engaged in the analytic programme. But this would hardly be thanks to Rorty. So I’m still a bit puzzled as to exactly who got rescued from what.
Sydney
Alan Schmierer