ABSTRACT
What Socrates was to Athenian society, Richard Rorty (1931-2007) was to twentiethcentury analytic philosophy-a stinging gadfly. Praised by some as one of the most original and provocative thinkers in recent memory, cursed by others as merely a flippant literary critic who trivialized the gravitas required by philosophical inquiry, and viewed by many more as perhaps being both, Rorty certainly “shook things up like few of his contemporaries.”1 An exemplar of the notion of a public intellectual, Rorty’s expansive authorship goes beyond the walls of academe and the pages of philosophy journals by modeling a deep commitment to interdisciplinary dialogue. An ardent defender of what he took to be a decidedly pragmatic (and specifically Deweyan) perspective, Rorty is perhaps best understood as someone who challenged philosophical privilege in the name of envisioning an expansive conversation for all humankind.2 In this way, Rorty is often thought of as an anti-philosopher. However, he is certainly a philosopher’s anti-philosopher. His work demonstrates just how extraordinarily well-read he was in the history of philosophy and his willingness to bring together figures as divergent as Donald Davidson (1917-2003), Wilfrid Sellars (1912-89), Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), John Rawls (1921-2002), and John Dewey (1859-1952) continues to be a model of how to overcome the stagnation that can accompany one’s singular operation within the all too rigid boundaries that characterize much of professional philosophical debate.
