>>CRISPIN SARTWELL: Well, I think, one reason why Richard Rorty, people pay so much attention
to Richard Rorty is that, is his kind of institutional effect and location.
>>RICHARD RORTY: I was professor of philosophy at Princeton for twenty years.
>>CRISPIN SARTWELL: He's a very widely respected and excellent analytic philosopher...
>>RICHARD RORTY: Then I was professor of humanities for fifteen years.
>>CRISPIN SARTWELL: ... who suddenly started worrying about Dewey and Heidegger.
>>RICHARD RORTY: Then I was professor of comparative literature at Stanford for seven years.
>>CRISPIN SARTWELL: And if you went to philosophy grad school in an analytic department, all
you were told about Dewey and Heidegger was that they were idiots, or that they, you know,
that they didn't matter at all, and that they never said anything meaningful, much less
important.
>>RICHARD BERNSTEIN: You have to know that I went to the University of Chicago as an
undergraduate during the period of the Hutchins period and one of my classmates at that time
was Richard Rorty.
But at Chicago, the attitude towards Dewey was Dewey was anathema.
>>CRISPIN SARTWELL: And so Rorty started, for one thing, just to synthesize a variety
of traditions, in a way.
And he was a person whom the philosophical establishment couldn't quite ignore when he
started to do that.
>>RICHARD BERNSTEIN: I said when he wrote in the preface to his book, Philosophy and
the Mirror of Nature, that the three most important philosophers of the twentieth century
are Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey.
I think lots of people would have thought, well, the analytic philosophers would agree
with Wittgenstein.
The continental with Heidegger but nobody would have agree that Dewey.
To put Dewey in the same category, in the same group would be considered a category
mistake.
>>TOM ALEXANDER: One of my professors told me not to work on Dewey because he was dead
as a doornail and of course 1979 was the year that Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of
Nature came out and once again you could say Dewey's name in public without people acting
as if you had farted in an elevator.
It was, it was quite a change.
>>RICHARD RORTY: Both Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions and my book, Philosophy
and the Mirror of Nature, were critical of a certain range of received opinion, within
the philosophical profession.
>>NEIL GROSS: I think that if there's a single story that stands out to my mind as interesting
and telling is it's that [dog growls] Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature did get published.
Yeah, I mean this kind of book which is seen as precipitated the revival and in certain
respects especially for figures outside of philosophy went out for peer review and in
its initial response there were two reviewers and one of them was effusively in support
of publication.
The other one who the editor at the press had though initially was going to be very
supportive of it concluded that the book was sloppily written, would be of interest only
to analysts, and ended with the prediction that almost no one outside of philosophy would
have any interest in the book.
>>RICHARD RORTY: We typically had more appreciative readers outside of philosophy departments
than within philosophy departments because the people outside of philosophy who had objections
to what was going on, or had objections to the prevailing currents of thought within
philosophy departments saw Kuhn and I as providing support for those suspicions and criticisms.
>>TOM ALEXANDER: Rorty actually did a great service by publishing that book.
It was a shock because he was regarded as a, one of the high priests of the analytic
movement at the time.
Our textbook in analytic philosophy was the one he had edited so it was quite a shock.
It was like someone throwing open a whole bunch of windows in a very stuffy building.
>>RICHARD BERNSTEIN: I want to be careful here because I've been engaged in argument
with Rorty for almost, for 40 years but it's an argument among friends and I'm a great
defender.
I think there are ways in which people tend to caricature Rorty.
I think what's at the heart of Rorty is that he's a great moralist in the best tradition
of Dewey and Whitman and Emerson and people frequently don't see that.
They think he's flip and indifferent and insensitive.
I think that's a complete mistake about what Rorty is about.
He's a man who's deeply concerned with very serious issues.
>>MICHAEL HODGES: So, the question is is Rorty a moralist or an ironist.
Well, certainly in some of his popular writing he's very clearly a moralist.
I mean very clearly in terms of what we liberals do he's staking out some moral territory.
>>DOUG ANDERSON: He writes widely.
He writes for more than philosophers.
He writes in ways that tend to affect and represent culture in the US.
>>RICHARD BERNSTEIN: At the same time he is a person who does think that there have been
exaggerated claims about the names of philosophy and he's a great debunker.
>>JOSEPH MARGOLIS: I'm attracted to Rorty's way of thinking.
I don't agree with him.
Perhaps in a profound way I don't agree with him.
But I do like the subversive quality of his way of getting at problems.
I think that he debunks the idea that philosophy is a science or that philosophy could be a
system or that there could be a science of science, so to say, which is philosophy, or
a knowledge about how we could know or something of that kind.
These seem to me to be excellent clues and if I may put it this way, I share with him
the thought that this kind of debunking is crucial to American pragmatism.
>>HILARY PUTNAM: You know, my friend Richard Rorty is a pragmatist.
I think Richard Rorty is a skeptic in the almost the old Greek sense.
Give up this talk about truth.
>>BRUCE WILSHIRE: Some analytic philosophers have, for example, complained about Richard
Rorty's neo- neo-pragmatism.
I would say he no longer believes apparently in the objectivity of truth.
Well, I would put it a different way.
I would simply say that according to some of his writings at least, he seems to suggest
that truth isn't really real, and the great American philosophers never said anything
like that.
>>RICHARD BERNSTEIN: There is what I sometimes call the good Rorty and the bad Rorty.
I mean he likes to be outrageous and to make claims and then very frequently he qualifies
his kinds of claims, I mean.
For example he has an ambivalence.
He sometimes wants to say pragmatism has nothing to do with politics but it seems to me that
a lot of his work belies it.
He's informed by the pragmatic spirit and it informs his kind of politics for it.
He, you know, wants to denigrate.
He talks about the disappearance of philosophy but there's another sense in which he doesn't.
It's philosophy with a capital P, it's traditional philosophy.
It's not philosophy in terms of some of the things I've been talking about in terms of
vision about this.
He argues as if he's impatient with argument but he's a brilliant arguer.
So these things that I think that sometimes he belies the things that he says.
>>RICHARD RORTY: I think that the Socratic ideal of self-knowledge is replaced among
contemporary intellectuals by the Nietzschean idea of self-creation so that the life of
the intellectual is not a matter of finding out what has been inside himself or herself
all the time.
It's a matter of becoming someone new.
And the same for societies.
Social progress is not a matter of discovering the essential nature of the state or of one's
nation or of one's society.
It's a matter of becoming a more rich, interesting society than in the past.