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Leiter on Szubka on Rorty

By Lawrence Solum

Brian Leiter (University of Chicago Law School) has posted Rorty and the Philosophical Tradition: A Comment on Professor Szubka on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

I agree with Tadusz Szubka's thesis that there is a "partial" continuity between Rorty's work in the 1960s (esp. The Linguistic Turn) and his later pragmatic philosophy in which he repudiated "analytic" philosophy. I suggest additional support for the thesis of continuity comes from an examination of Rorty's undergraduate and graduate education. I then argue that the real puzzle about Rorty's intellectual development is not why he gave up on "analytic" philosophy - he had never been much committed to that research agenda, even before it became moribund--but why, beginning with Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (PMN), he gave up on the central concerns of philosophy going back to antiquity. Many contemporary philosophers influenced by Quine's attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction and Sellars' attack on "the Myth of the Given" (the two argumentative linchpins of PMN) didn't abandon philosophical questions about truth, knowledge, and mind, they just concluded those questions needed to be naturalized, to be answered in conjunction with the empirical sciences. Why didn't Rorty go this route? The paper concludes with some interesting anecdotes about Rorty that invite speculative explanations.

And from the paper:

Rorty?s first wife, the philosopher Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, described the young Richard Rorty as ?dedicated to the greater glory of God through philosophy? (Gross, 198) and suggested to his biographer, Neil Gross, that the psychoanalysis he underwent during much of the 1960s and into the early 1970s (Gross, 216 n. 98) contributed significantly to the work that became Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.

The second anecdote comes from my own experience. I was fortunate as a college student to have Rorty as a teacher, in a course covering Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and William James! The theme of the course was clear in retrospect: reactions to Kant either went the bad metaphysical route (Fichte and Hegel) or the good pragmatist route (Marx, Nietzsche, and James). In retrospect, the narrative was implausible, but there is no doubt that Rorty was a gifted lecturer and I remain grateful for the experience. But what is relevant here is a comment Rorty made one day during a discussion section: ?it?s too bad,? he said, ?that there turned out to be no absolute to correspond to,? which was followed by one of his trademark shrugs.

There is no God and there is no ?absolute??Quine and Nietzsche, among many others, would have agreed with those claims. Why did Rorty respond to those realizations his way, rather than Quine?s or Nietzsche?s? The real answer may, alas, rest with his psychoanalyst.

Fun and compact!

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on February 11, 2010 (boomark / email).