Richard Rorty

Abstract

I arrived at Princeton as a new graduate student in September 1979. It was a big step for me. I had never been east of the Mississippi, nor had I any experience with elite institutions like Princeton University. During the first semester, I wrote my first paper as a graduate student, which I published in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy, passed my logic qualification (by the skin of my teeth and Dick Jeffrey's good nature), and took my oral examination (on Hume), a Princeton ritual for new graduate students. By then it was Christmas. To save money, I did not return to my family in Canada. Instead, I remained in my Graduate College room and read the new book by Princeton philosopher Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.As an undergraduate I had heard Rorty speak when he gave a lecture at the University of Lethbridge. I had read his eliminative materialism papers but nothing else. Since arriving at Princeton I had not found an occasion to introduce myself, but after reading the book I knew that I wanted him for a supervisor. When the new semester began, I sought him out in his office, expressed my appreciation of the book, and asked if he would supervise my yet-to-be determined doctoral work, which he graciously agreed to do. Rorty did not supervise a lot of graduate students at Princeton. Before me were Lawrence Bonjour, Michael Williams, and Robert Brandom. I was the last before he relocated to Virginia.I do not recall when I formulated the idea of a dissertation on Heidegger. Rorty offered a seminar on Being and Time in my second year, and it was probably then that I got the idea. Proposing a dissertation on Heidegger to the Princeton department was provocative and controversial. No one had ever wanted to do such a thing, and people who did were not welcome there. An oral examination would be required on the proposed dissertation area. It may have been embarrassing to the department not to be able to formulate a competent committee. There was Rorty, of course. Fortunately David Hills was an adjunct professor that year, and he fit perfectly. That left need of a third, and it fell to Gil Harman. I had interacted with Gil a lot in my first year, when he held a small seminar in his office for new graduate students. I did very well. I wrote the paper I later published. Gil had also been an examiner for my Great Man exam, and gave me pass/credit, when pass/ no-credit was the norm, making the exam equivalent to completing a graduate seminar. So I did not worry about having him on the examining committee. I should have. He refused to sign the document affirming that I passed. Dick refused to sign too, just because Gil had. But the department called it a pass anyway, and I drove to New Hampshire for some time well away from 1879 Hall.We do not normally teach our children how to speak. We just live with them and talk to them and they learn. Most of what I learned from Dick was learned that way, by his letting me into his family and involving me in things they did together, and giving us lots of time to talk about anything we wanted to. The first such occasion was a surprise to me. I had never socialized with my university teachers before. One morning he was leaving the department office as I was and we walked together down Prospect Lane in our common direction. As I was about to veer off toward my room, he asked me to come back to his place for lunch. That was when I met Mary and two young children, Patricia and Kevin. The house was big and rambling and there were books everywhere, which I liked. We arranged to go birding, something we would do many times. We met on a Saturday morning and walked into the countryside beyond the Institute for Advanced Study. We followed a disused canal trail, something I had never seen, and he showed me an old churchyard where a signer of the Declaration of Independence was buried.Our visits continued after Dick moved to Virginia. He was still my Princeton supervisor of record, and was reading and commenting on dissertation material. …