Nate,
I have to take responsibility for this. I'm the one who (for better or for
worse) has been making such a big deal out of him.
Richard Rorty is an American philosopher who's been called, by Harold Bloom,
"the most interesting philosopher alive." While beeing quite interesting, he's
also been quite reviled by much of the American philosophical establishment.
His most important books are Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) and
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989). He is, however, a quite prolific
essayist and is better at home in that medium. He has several collections of
his most important essays including Consequences of Pragmatism (1982),
Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (1991), Essays on Heidegger and Others
(1991), Truth and Progress (1998), and Philosophy and Social Hope (2000). I
especially recommend checking out the last one from your local library, if one
were so inclined, as it is a collection of relatively nontechnical essays that
bring across his project over the last 25 years.
Aside from this curriculum vitae, I hesitate to elaborate too fully on his
ideas here, as much of it has been contextualized in many of my posts over the
last two months. But I will say a few things as the archives are temporarily
down (July is still there, however, and that contains the first few posts I had
on Rorty).
Rorty is first and foremost a pragmatist following in John Dewey's shoes. His
opus, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, is the standard in which his
pragmatic repudiation of the Platonic tradition's obsession with ahistorical
Truth is put forth. Since then he has moved further and further from what is
thought of traditionally as Philosophy and closer and closer to what is
traditionally thought of as literary criticism and politics.
The reason his name is flying around so much is my (Rortyan) belief that a mode
of imaginative thinking is the colligation of hitherto unrelated texts. The
two "texts" I'm binding together are Rorty and Pirsig. I find Rorty helps me
enunciate what I love about Pirsig and what I do not. Pirsig also provides a
level of personal inspiration that can only be found in a touching
semiautobiographical narrative.
I hope that is somewhat explanatory. If you have any other questions, feel
free, of course, to ask and/or jump into the debates already going on.
Matt
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