Death of Richard Rorty
Or:
Philosophy Buries Another Of Its Undertakers

Richard Rorty died on Friday. Here's a link to a story. [via Metafilter]

I had a few discussions with Rorty when he was at UVa and I was teaching at William and Mary and living in Charlottesville. I disagreed with him about as much as you can disagree with someone, but he struck me as being an extremely nice man. I was just finishing my dissertation at the time, and I was a rather captious and aggressive little analytic philosopher, hell-bent on defending a version of meat-axe realism that I didn't really even understand. He was more patient with me than he was, strictly speaking, obligated to be.

(Incidentally, I don't read much Rorty, really, but happen to have been re-reading his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, finishing it, oddly enough, on Friday.)

None of that is to suggest that he wasn't wrong about a lot of things, because, so far as I can tell, he was. But there's a lot of that going around in philosophy, so it's probably not the kind of thing to hold against somebody.

He's one of the few contemporary American academic philosophers whose thought seeped out into the world. Unfortunately lots of it was probably wrong in a way that fanned the flames of various types of common confusions. (The comments here at Metafilter is fairly typical--a tangle of confusions based on only the wispiest understanding of the issues. (My favorite: if we disagree about things, then truth is socially constructed. Even Rorty didn't think that.)) But that's a different story for a different time.

I think Rorty pushed certain themes in a certain kind of analytic philosophy (e.g. the thought of Quine and Sellars) farther than most others had done before him. Lots of analytics didn't like where he ended up, but I have to say, I often think that the only difference between Rorty and those analytics is that he was a bit more consistent than they. He took a certain kind of meat-axe naturalism and physicalism to heart, and concluded (among other things) that they were fatal to the philosophical enterprise as classically conceived. So he concluded that a different conception of philosophy was called for. I didn't agree with him, but that's in part because I'm skeptical of his versions of naturalism and physicalism. I had rather more respect for Rorty than I have for those who want to have their cake and eat it too by embracing naturalism and physicalism while ignoring what seem to be their more radical consequences.

Rest in peace, Professor Rorty.