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Monday, January 15, 2007
Rorty and His Critics
I find it interesting that the Louis Menand piece from Profession 2005, “Dangers Within and Without”, has been bombed to the surface, for better or worse, by Brian Boyd’s polemical depth charges. (nnyhav informs me: more here from Boyd.) I mostly agree with the negative critique, without sharing Boyd’s specifically biological enthusiasms. I read the Menand last year and considered having a go at it myself. It really is a confused piece, in my considered opinion. And, of course, it all orbits ‘theory’ - so I am just the one to clear up the clutter, I am sure you agree. Let me approach indirectly by telling you that I’ve just been rereading Rorty and His Critics
The volume consists of 13 critical essays - respectful but extremely vigorous attacks on Rorty by 13 philosophers. And 13 considerate responses by Rorty himself. You could fault the volume for being too ‘analytic’ in focus, relative to its title. The non-Anglo-American contributors are Habermas and Jacques Bouveresse. But the narrowness seems mostly harmless, in that there is no attempt to pretend that there aren’t others attacking Rorty on the other flank, as it were. It’s not like the thing needed to be 1000 pages, instead of 500. Does anyone know of a volume that is, in effect, Rorty and his continental critics? Or anything like that?
Rorty is really at his best here. He doesn’t indulge in certain of his signature rhetorical moves that - well, I don’t hate them, but I’ve had quite enough over the years. (I talk about this stuff here.) I think it’s rather interesting - and no accident - that Rorty is at his best when arguing with analytic philosophers, i.e. he really only shines in the light of this stuff he’d like to extinguish. (Complex irony to be considered on another occasion.)
Anyway, if everything you sort of, kind of think you know about analytic philosophy you sort of, kind of got from reading Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, this volume might be good for initiating you into the 90’s. Various figures whose assumptions and attitudes you may find puzzlingly orthogonal to your own explain themselves in Rortyan terms - i.e. anti-Rortyan terms. So you may be able to leverage understanding of Rorty into an understanding of some unfamiliar thoughts and figures. (It just might work.)
Now. Menand. The short version is that he could maybe do with a careful reading of Rorty and His Critics. The long version? Maybe I’ll get to it later in the week.
Comments
Are you looking at me, buddy?
This is a terrific book. Was looking it over this summer. Equally good is Chomsky and His Critics. In fact, the whole “and his critics” series is pretty cool.
Do you know if this book has been translated into spanish?
I’m trying to deepen my study on Rorty and pragmatists authors, but there aren’t many good volumes on contemporary anglo american philosophy available in argentina.
Thanks!
Martín
Hear, hear – this is a great collection. The exchange with Bjorn Ramberg is not to be missed, as Ramberg finally extracts a key concession (about the normativity of truth). One caveat: in Davidson’s contribution ("Truth Rehabilitated"), he finally succumbs to decades of pressure from Rorty on that same point (ironically, just as Rorty is conceding the opposite to Ramberg), when he would have done better to stand firm. Bilgrami’s and McDowell’s papers are better on this (the former addresses Davidson directly, on what I agree are properly Davidsonian grounds).
If this is to serve as “an introduction to contemporary Anglo-American philosophy for people who have read Rorty and a bit of Austin and Wittgenstein and maybe an article by Davidson that they didn’t quite get,” which it very well might, then I have two suggestions: first, that the most important supplementary reading for this volume would be (not more Rorty, who has been treading water for the past twenty years, but) the key papers by Davidson, which do a lot of the intellectual spadework on which many of the Critics rely. (I single out “Three Varieties of Knowledge,” in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective; but the rest of that volume, parts of Truth, Language, and History, and the earlier, more conventionally analytic work collected in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, which sets it all up, are also required.) Second, recognize that while this all fits loosely into the big tent of “analytic philosophy,” taking Rorty (or even Davidson!) seriously is quite the minority view there. John and I are not exactly, um, paradigm examples of the breed (we even read Kierkegaard! —shh, don’t tell anyone).
Hmmmm, there’s sort of an ambiguity in ‘taking seriously’. Lots of people don’t take Davidson seriously in the sense that they haven’t seriously studied him. They haven’t read him (although, in philosophy, they have surely heard of him.) But no one would ever worry that saying they were working on Davidson would cause them not to be taken seriously. Rorty might get you a bit more of that. Though, honestly, I think most philosophers would hold fire and wait to hear what you actually had to say about it.
Yes, I suppose you’re right about that ambiguity. I was specifically warned against working on Rorty ("nobody wants to hear about that stuff"), but Davidson is generally respected. What I guess I meant was that no-one takes seriously the idea that what Davidson says – those views – might actually be right (or, as you say, even read him enough to get clear on what it is that he is saying). Same for Wittgenstein, in my experience: some lip service, okay to work on him if you’re into that, little understanding, virtually no agreement where it counts (i.e. where he has not simply seemingly anticipated some presently accepted view, like a Quinean rejection of the “mental” or something). Grumble. Good lord, I’m turning into Emerson.
The impression I got from the Blackwell Companion to Philosophy of Language was that even with Quine, most people aren’t a hurry to give a sympathetic hearing to his more radical positions (indeterminacy of translation, eg). I’d check the book on this but I’m at home and it’s in my office, so, eh.