Rorty and the philosophical tradition: comment on professor Szubka

Abstract

I am grateful to Professor Szubka for the stimulus of his paper 1 and the op� portunity it presents to think about the relationship between Richard Rorty's later pragmatic philosophy and the socalled tradition he came to repudi� ate. I am in agreement with Professor Szubka's central thesis, namely, that there is a partial continuity between the Rorty of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and his later writing, and the Rorty of the 1960s: Rorty was not the diehard philosopher who then, suddenly and inexplicably, gave up on the whole business. His metaphilosophical work in that decade, especially as exemplified in The Lin� guistic Turn, signaled quite clearly his misgivings about the philosophical project typically associated with the analytic tradition (which at that time, at least, was not yet moribund). I will offer some additional support for Professor Szubka's thesis drawn from Neil Gross's recent biography of Rorty, which illuminates both Rorty's education at Chicago and Yale in the 1940s and 1950s and the context in which he became a kind of philosopher at Princeton in the 1960s 2 . I shall then suggest that the more striking question about Rorty is not why he gave up on philosophy, but why he gave up on philosophy , that is, on a two� thousand year tradition stretching back to antiquity, one which nothing in his pre� Princeton education and experience would have led us to expect. Rorty's radical break was not with 'analytic' philosophy — a point often obscured in popular presentations of his work — but with philosophy itself. And it is that that demands some explanation. As Neil Gross demonstrates, the two formative influences in Rorty's phi� losophical education were the historical orientation of the University of Chicago (especially under the tutelage of Richard McKeon), where he was an undergradu� ate, and the metaphysical and even theological orientation of the Yale Univer� sity department, where he was a graduate student. Indeed, speculative metaphys�