Richard Rorty

The Making of an American Philosopher

Neil Gross

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780226676487, 9780226309903
• eBook ISBN: 9780226309910
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosopher Biographies

On his death in 2007, Richard Rorty was heralded by the New York Times as "one of the world's most influential contemporary thinkers." Controversial on the left and the right for his critiques of objectivity and political radicalism, Rorty experienced a renown denied to all but a handful of living philosophers. In this masterly biography, Neil Gross explores the path of Rorty's thought over the decades in order to trace the intellectual and professional journey that led him to that prominence.

The child of a pair of leftist writers who worried that their precocious son "wasn't rebellious enough," Rorty enrolled at the University of Chicago at the age of fifteen. There he came under the tutelage of polymath Richard McKeon, whose catholic approach to philosophical systems would profoundly influence Rorty's own thought. Doctoral work at Yale led to Rorty's landing a job at Princeton, where his colleagues were primarily analytic philosophers. With a series of publications in the 1960s, Rorty quickly established himself as a strong thinker in that tradition—but by the late 1970s Rorty had eschewed the idea of objective truth altogether, urging philosophers to take a "relaxed attitude" toward the question of logical rigor. Drawing on the pragmatism of John Dewey, he argued that philosophers should instead open themselves up to multiple methods of thought and sources of knowledge—an approach that would culminate in the publication of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, one of the most seminal and controversial philosophical works of our time.

In clear and compelling fashion, Gross sets that surprising shift in Rorty's thought in the context of his life and social experiences, revealing the many disparate influences that contribute to the making of knowledge. As much a book about the growth of ideas as it is a biography of a philosopher, Richard Rorty will provide readers with a fresh understanding of both the man and the course of twentieth-century thought.

Index

Abbott, Andrew, 343

absolutes, philosophical, 95

“academic depression,” 297

academic field, 241–43. See also under Bourdieu

academic freedom, 291–92, 327

academic habitus, 243, 245–46

academic life, politics of, 320–21

academic professionalization, 289–95, 298–99

Academic Revolution, The (Jencks and Riesman), 310

Achieving Our Country (Rorty), 23, 322, 323

action-theoretical processes, 263. See also Structure of Social Action

Actor-Network theory, 11n28

Actuality, 134–35

Adams, Henry, 112

Addams, Jane, 75

Adler, Mortimer, 86, 95, 106, 109, 111, 122

Alexander, Jeffrey, 256, 258–63

Althusser, Louis, 247

American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF), 54–56, 58–60

American Council of Learned Societies, 203

American Philosophical Association (APA) Eastern Division, 18, 220;

1979 convention, 223–25;

Executive Committee, 221, 224;

Nominating Committee and 1979 election, 220–25;

pluralist revolt, 217–27;

presidents, 217;

Program Committee, 222;

Rorty as president of, 216–17, 224–26

American Revolution Bicentennial Administration (ARBA), 328–29

American Workers Party, 54

analytic and nonanalytic approaches,

Rorty as translator between, 149

analytic and nonanalytic philosophers:

conflict between, 196;

dialogue between, 17, 150, 152;

Rorty on, 180–81. See also pluralist revolt

“analytic establishment,” 221–23

analytic philosopher(s), 186;

Rorty as, 4, 17–19, 160, 191, 308, 313

analytic philosophy, 3, 4;

Catholic philosophers and, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface for My Fellow Sociologists
• Acknowledgements
• Archival Sources
• Introduction
• One. James Rorty
• Two. Winifred Raushenbush
• Three. The Hutchins College
• Four. M.A. in Philosophy, 1949-1952
• Five. Ph.D. at Yale, 1952-1956
• Six. Wellesley College, 1958-1961
• Seven. Princeton University, 1961-1965
• Eight. Princeton University, 1965-1982
• Nine. The Theory of Intellectual Self- Concept
• Ten. Rorty Reexamined
• Conclusion
• Index