American Philosophy After Rorty

April 11, 2009 11:05 PM

What to read of American philosophy (or the lack thereof) after Rorty?

Just wondering if anyone has any recommendations of works or articles by intellectuals who are picking up where Rorty has left off.

posted by ageispolis to Religion & Philosophy (6 answers total)

Well, he's only been gone two years, right? So not a lot. It depends, though. A lot of people have wanted to steer pragmatism away from the directions he suggested, and you can think of that as post-Rorty. Probably the most important figure directly influenced by Rorty but not the sort of gleeful relativist he suggests would be Robert Brandom. Brandom is notoriously dense and difficult as a writer, but Jeremy Wanderer's book on him has been garnering praise for getting past some of that. After that, try Articulating Reasons. Making It Explicit and Between Saying and Doing are pretty impenetrable and I'd hold off on those unless you actually intend to do research in the field.

But it sounds like you're looking for people who take his ideas more seriously and try to build on them. In terms of taking academic concerns and becoming a very public and accessible spokesperson for a radically different take on them, I don't think anyone has filled that void yet. I also don't know that Rorty will have the effect of launching a school of thought as some philosophers do. His strength was really in synthesizing strands in many different thinkers and deflating philosophical expectations in light of them. If you're successful at that latter set of tasks, you're likely to drive people away from the field, not in a new direction within it. He spoke of a "post-philosophical" culture at times, and that may reflect where he thought his work would point.
posted by el_lupino at 6:05 AM on April 12, 2009

Habermas engages with Rorty to a good extent.
posted by paultopia at 9:18 AM on April 12, 2009

What good Rortian would take up where Rorty left off rather than turning to their own idiosyncrasies in order to let a thousand vocabularies bloom?

More seriously, though, the book Rorty and His Critics is probably a good place to go if you are interested in the philosophical side more than the public figure side. It has a really fine introductory essay by Brandom, as well as a subsequent more polemical one, and also has pieces on/against Rorty by Habermas, James Conant, Hilary Putnam, Donald Davidson, McDowell, a few more. Rorty responds to each piece, and in a few places shifts his position slightly due to being convinced by what has been said—his response to Bjorn Ramberg is particularly interesting in this regard. It would be a good place to start if you wanted to pick up with sympathetic but different strands of thought. There's a similar book that hasn't been published yet from the Library of Living Philosophers. Link.

It would help in recommendations, though, if you said just what in Rorty you're looking to find taken up elsewhere.
posted by felix grundy at 12:37 PM on April 12, 2009

It's hard to tell from this brief and sketchy question whether you're looking for students and disciples of Rorty's, or people directly engaged with his works and his ideas, or people who are like him in some way. On the chance that the latter is what you're looking for, I'd encourage you to read some of Stanley Cavell's work: while he hasn't had that much to say about or to Rorty directly, he's an American philosopher whose taste is similarly catholic and whose work is similarly engaged with both Continental and analytic thought.
posted by RogerB at 1:04 PM on April 12, 2009

Response by poster: To elaborate on my question, I am looking for those particularly engaged with his work (and are somewhat like him). Habermas is a good example, for he pointed out how Rorty's "stark" distinction between the public and private is problematic. I've come across Stanley Cavell in reading the so-called "new" therapeutic interpretations of Wittgenstein (I'm actually studying under Jan Zwicky who is a fellow proponent of these new interpretations). Brandom is a good suggestion. Any others?
posted by ageispolis at 12:23 AM on April 13, 2009

There's definitely a counter-intuititive element to Rorty, in that according to him a person really needs to stop "doing philosophy" to succeed at anything. The fact that he ended his career, consciously, as a Humanities Professor rather that a Philosophy Professor is telling.

I took a great literature and aesthetics course co-taught by him at UVA, fwiw.
posted by bardic at 4:00 AM on April 13, 2009