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>>RICHARD RORTY: I think the book of mine that's been most widely read is Contingency,

Irony, & Solidarity.

It's certainly the one that's generated the most fan mail.

I get letters of appreciation about that book, but not about any of the other books.

So I guess I regard that one as my most successful production.

It's the one I find most interesting.

I suspect that fame produces more interesting work on the part of the person who has become

famous because his or her ideas are more widely discussed, debated.

So, the originator of the ideas gets more ideas as a consequence of having earlier ideas

more widely discussed.

I doubt that there's any real downside to fame.

I wrote a book chapter talking about the Nietzsche-Heidegger-Derrida sequence saying that Heidegger's mission in

life was to get beyond Nietzsche, to find something to say that Nietzsche hadn't already

said.

And that Derrida's mission in life was to get beyond Heidegger to say something that

Heidegger hadn't already said.

So I think of them as forming a dialectical sequence that embodies a good deal of what

was important in twentieth century philosophy.

When I say that I don't think that philosophy as a discipline has a mission, what I mean

is that academic disciplines are created by drawing fairly arbitrary boundaries within

intellectual life in order to make career paths possible for young people.

I think taking the boundary lines between philosophy and religion or between anthropology

and sociology with any great seriousness is making a mistake.

It's only librarians and deans who need to worry about where one discipline stops and

another begins.

So I wouldn't bother to ask about where literature stops and philosophy begins, or where sociology

stops and political philosophy begins.

When I'm not reading philosophy I'm usually reading novels and I suppose that novelists

have had more influence on the way I think than any other kind of writer.

My sense of the problems of My Own Country was largely formed by novelists like Sinclair

Lewis, Upton Sinclair, James Farrell, Juan dos Passos.

My sense of the problems of becoming a decent human being was shaped by reading the usual

range of people.

Dostoyevsky, Virginia Woolf, Proust.

So, I suppose that I think of the novel as the most influential kind of writing in the

modern world but this may just be the fact that I read a lot of them -- a reflection

of the fact that I read a lot of novels myself.

People in a given discipline can become over-professionalized in the sense that they cease to read anything

except texts written by members of the same discipline.

This leads to the decay of the discipline because it ceases to have any interaction

with anything outside itself; it becomes self-absorbed; nobody reads books produced by members of

the discipline except other members of the discipline.

Well, whenever a discipline becomes hyper-professionalized as analytic philosophy has become, there's

a danger that young people going into that discipline will be forced to simply read in

a narrower area within the discipline and have no time left over for reading books in

other areas of the discipline or, more importantly, books outside the discipline.

When that happens, you can often get increasing irrelevance of the discipline to intellectual

life as a whole.

There's a lot of talk these days about the crisis of the humanities.

I've never been able to figure out what the crisis is.

They seem to me in as good shape as they ever were.

The humanities and social science departments of the universities are privileged sanctuaries

for left-wing intellectuals interested in bringing about greater social and economic

equality.

They serve an important social function because of that.

Intellectual life within universities is at as high a level as it has ever been.

I think people are sometimes worried that the stream of writings by people in literature

departments has become tiresomely jargon-ridden and inscrutable and the stream of writing

in philosophy departments also jargon-ridden and inscrutable but this is the inevitable

consequence of professionalization and I don't see how you can organize a university without

that kind of professionalization so I take it to be a necessary evil.

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