“In Other Words”: The Philosophical Writings of Richard Rorty

Abstract

Richard Rorty's work is the most important (and accessible) by an American philosopher since Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Anticipated by an essay introducing The Linguistic Turn (1967), expressed most forcefully in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) and supplemented by The Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), Rorty's intention has been to undermine the tradition of modern philosophy founded on Descartes' mind?body dualism, Locke's account of the explanation and justification of knowledge and Kant's enumeration of the constitutive principles of thoughtin a word, founda tionalism. Rorty's enterprise is revolutionary, for he claims that the foundational ist position can no longer deliver significant results. In the Anglo-American tradition, logical positivism and analytic philosophy, and on the continent, phenomenology, have come to the end of the road. Whatever praise Rorty may mete out to them in passing, he has come primarily to bury them. But Rorty's writings have more than intramural (to philosophy) interest. Like Jacques Derrida, he has no interest in replacing foundationalism with something better. Rather he hopes for philosophy's demise or that it will go the way of theology and become a quaint speciality. In concrete terms Rorty urges other discourses/disciplines to refuse to take a backseat to philosophy. This is not simply because philosophy deals with trivial problems. That would imply that philosophy then had only to get its head screwed on right and then reclaim its position as the privileged discourse. Instead, Rorty thinks that in principle philosophy can lay no claim to be a foundational discipline, because it, like all other types of discourse, is founded upon certain metaphorical descriptions of mind-body and word-world relationships. In other words, it is just as dependent on presuppositions, just as written, as other sorts of discourse. Roughly what Derrida is doing to the continental tradition and what Hayden White has attempted with modern historiography in Metahistory (1973), Rorty is also