New Literary History, vol. 39, no 1 (hiver 2008) - Remembering Richard Rorty

New Literary History focuses on theory and interpretation-the reasons for literary change, the definitions of periods, and the evolution of styles, conventions, and genres. Throughout its history, NLH has always resisted short-lived trends and subsuming ideologies. By delving into the theoretical bases of practical criticism, the journal reexamines the relation between past works and present critical and theoretical needs. A major international forum for scholarly interchange, NLH has brought into English many of today' s foremost theorists whose works had never before been translated. Under Ralph Cohen's continuous editorship, NLH has become what he envisioned over thirty years ago: "a journal that is a challenge to the profession of letters." NLH has the unique distinction of receiving six awards from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ).

Vol. 39, no 1 (hiver 2008) - Remembering Richard Rorty

Ralph Cohen
Introduction
Richard Rorty rewrote the history of philosophy by reinvigorating American pragmatism. He believed with William James "that if a debate has no practical significance, then it has no philosophical significance." He was an independent thinker who enjoyed debating with his opponents orally and in writing. His views offended some philosophers and other scholars, but they were expressed in a language that avoided "sterile scholasticism." In his quiet and gentle manner, he provoked and often disturbed audiences to reconsider their values about the good, the true, the just, and the beautiful. This collection of essays by international authors conveys Rorty's international role. The contributions come from scholars in many disciplines: philosophy, sociology, history, poetry, and literary studies. The aim has been to provide a study of Richard Rorty that explores the range and significance of his insights. Trained as a philosopher at... (Exrait)

Meredith Williams
Contingency, Solidarity—Irony: For Richard Rorty

Jürgen Habermas
". . . And to define America, her athletic democracy": The Philosopher and the Language Shaper; In Memory of Richard Rorty
Dear Mary, Dear Friends and Colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen, Given the highly personal occasion that brings us together here today, please allow me to start with a private memory. I first met Richard Rorty in 1974 at a conference on Heidegger in San Diego. At the beginning of the convention, a video was screened of an interview with the absent Herbert Marcuse, who in it described his relationship to Heidegger in the early 1930s more mildly than the sharp postwar correspondence between the two men would have suggested. Much to my annoyance, this set the tone for the entire conference, where an unpolitical veneration of Heidegger prevailed. Only Marjorie Green, who had likewise studied in Freiburg... (Extrait)

Richard J. Bernstein
Richard Rorty's Deep Humanism
I first met Dick Rorty in 1949 when I went to the "Hutchins College" at the University of Chicago�the institution described by A. J. Liebling as "the biggest collection of juvenile neurotics since the Childrens' Crusade." Dick had already entered Chicago in 1946 at the age of fifteen and was beginning his MA in philosophy. After Chicago, Dick went on to Yale in 1952 for his doctoral studies, and he encouraged several of his Chicago friends (including me) to join him. From those early Chicago and Yale days, we became close personal friends�a friendship that lasted until his death in 2007. On the occasion of my 70th birthday in 2002, Dick Rorty wrote: "Richard Bernstein and I are almost exact contemporaries, were educated in mostly the same places by mostly the same people, have been exalted by many of the same hopes, and have been talking to one... (Extrait)

Jeffrey Stout
Rorty at Princeton
Once a year the Daily Princetonian used to publish lists of the top-rated courses. When I arrived at Princeton in 1972 to begin my graduate work in religion, Dick Rorty's lecture course on metaphysics and epistemology routinely appeared on the list of the top-ten courses with enrollment over fifty. Two of my friends signed up to take the course. The graduate student precept was held in Dick's office in McCosh Hall. Dick was so lacking in social skills, according to my friends, that when the fifty minutes of discussion concluded, he didn't know how to signal this, and would simply swivel in his chair and begin working at his desk. Knowing what I was working on, my friends advised me to attend one of Dick's lectures on Wilfrid Sellars. Dick had been too ill to give the previous lecture. He distributed a mimeographed version of... (Exrait)

E. D. Hirsch
Rorty and the Priority of Democracy to Philosophy
I missed knowing Richard Rorty at Yale in the 1950s when we overlapped as graduate students in different fields. Our acquaintance and, later on, our warm friendship started with an encounter at a lecture he was giving at Stanford, in the academic year 1980�81 when I was at the nearby Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. I came to hear his talk because I had just read Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature with great admiration for the quality of its thinking and writing. Our first encounter was quintessential Rorty; it prefigured the pattern of many subsequent conversations. His lecture included a strong attack on the ideas of Hans Reichenbach, my hero at the time because of his powerful argument in a book of 1920... (Extrait)

Richard Rorty
Texts and Lumps
Like most other disciplines, literary criticism swings back and forth between a desire to do small-scale jobs well and carefully and a desire to paint the great big picture. At the moment it is at the latter pole, and is trying to be abstract, general, and theoretical. This has resulted in literary critics taking more of an interest in philosophy, and philosophers returning the compliment. This exchange has been useful to both groups. I think, however, that there is a danger that literary critics seeking help from philosophy may take philosophy a bit too seriously. They will do this if they think of philosophers as supplying "theories of meaning" or "theories of the nature of interpretation," as if "philosophical research" into such topics had recently yielded interesting new "results." Philosophy too swings back and forth between a self-image modeled on that of Kuhnian... (Exrait)

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
Rita Felski
The Inspirational Power of a Shy Philosopher
Listening to Richard Rorty taking part in a discussion or indeed hearing him lecture was always a rhetorical pleasure and an intellectual event, quite apart from how much you agreed or not with his ideas. Walking with him... (Extrait)

Andrzej Szahaj
Richard Rorty: Memories
It was in 1984, I think, or perhaps 1985. At the end of a doctoral seminar held by my great teacher, Professor Jerzy Kmita, at Adam Mickiewicz University in Pozna�, Poland, a small group of us stood chatting about this and that. Among us was Slawek Magala, at that time an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and today professor of international relations at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. He has always impressed me with his wide reading, which includes acquaintance with all the latest literature in philosophy and sociology. I recall that on this particular day he expressed enthusiasm for a book, and a philosopher, up to that time unknown to me�Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature by a certain Richard Rorty. I remembered the name and the title. Then, in 1987, thanks to Profesor Zbigniew Pe�czy�ski from Oxford University and his organization, the... (Extrait)

Frank Ankersmit
Rorty and History
The topic of "Rorty and history" is, at first sight, not a very promising one. Rorty never discussed any of the great historians from the past and the present, such as Gibbon, Ranke, Burckhardt, Huizinga, Meinecke, or Braudel.1 He was even less interested in philosophy of history and considered this discipline to be devoid of interest and significance.2 He never commented on the work of Hayden White�the most influential contemporary philosopher of history�though he must have been quite well aware of its existence3 and of how close it came to his own scholarly interests.4 Next, it is true that Rorty wrote quite a lot on political philosophy, philosophy of culture, and literary theory, all of them fields that are not too remote from the professional interests of historians and philosophers of history. But he never felt... (Extrait)

Richard Rorty
Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida
I Here is one way to look at physics: there are some invisible things which are parts of everything else and whose behavior determines the way everything else works. Physics is the search for an accurate description of those invisible things, and it proceeds by finding better and better explanations of the visible. Eventually, by way of microbiological accounts of the mental, and through causal accounts of the mechanisms of language, we shall be able to see the physicists' accumulation of truths about the world as itself a transaction between these invisible things. Here is another way of looking at physics: the physicists are men looking for new interpretations of the Book of Nature. After each pedestrian period of normal science, they dream up a new model, a new picture, a new vocabulary, and then they... (Extrait)

Annette Baier
Can Philosophers Be Patriots?
Richard Rorty challenged the profession of philosophy to examine its own activities, to avoid false consciousness of what it is that we do. We are not, he claimed, scientists of the mind, nor discerners of eternal moral truths. Ours is not a view sub specie aeternitatis, but a view from a given culture at a given time. This challenge is salutary, and has been influential, but largely outside philosophy. The Princeton philosophy department is still doing the sorts of things they were doing when Rorty left and turned his back on the analytic philosophy he had practiced up until then.1 I attended a graduate seminar he gave on the philosophy of mind as a visitor in Pittsburgh shortly before he left Princeton, and I was a member of the APA board on the memorable occasion when he quarreled with his old friend Ruth Marcus and wept with the anguish... (Extrait)

David Rigsbee
Rorty

David Rigsbee
Wised Up

David Rigsbee
Rorty from a Poet's View
Until "Pragmatism and Romanticism," "Philosophy as a Transitional Genre," and his late essay in Poetry ("The Fire of Life"), Rorty's relationship to poetry was not what was uppermost in the minds of readers who thought of him as busy (perhaps too busy) diversifying the genres of literature. Of course Rorty knew that there was plenty of bad old Platonism to go around in poetry circles, and in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, he had made it clear that the imaginative writing he found most useful was the narrative kind that provided edifying discourses. Fiction fit the mold best because its province was the march of character over time. Poetry, by contrast, seemed fixated on the timeless, and since there was little... (Extrait)

Günter Leypoldt
Uses of Metaphor: Richard Rorty's Literary Criticism and the Poetics of World-Making
The so-called revival of pragmatism since the 1980s gained much of its cultural momentum in literature departments that welcomed Richard Rorty's philosophical antitraditionalism as a refreshing contribution to contemporary theory. And yet, Rorty's authority as a literary scholar has remained ambiguous. While literary critics tend to appreciate his turn to narrative�as an alternative to abstract theorizing�they often find it harder to accept his narrative ethics. As a result (and in contrast to the most prominent pragmatists in the literary field),1 Rorty has been accused of a backward-looking approach to literary artwork: a program of "literature as ethical reflection," according to... (Extrait)