ABSTRACT
At the time of his death in June of 2007, many newspaper obituaries and remembrances written by fellow academics identified Richard Rorty as the most frequently-read and generally influential American philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century. The reasons offered for his popularity were various. Part of it came down to his being well situated in the academic establishment, teaching at major universities including Princeton and Stanford. The issues motivating his writings were central to the mid-twentieth century’s mainstream academic philosophical project, and his challenges to mainline presuppositions were vigorous enough, and published in major-enough venues, that he commanded attention. His writing style was congenial and approachable, which widened his appeal beyond academic philosophy. More than one of his autobiographical pieces reports his pleasure at being read in the halls of both the philosophy and comparative literature departments, a fact brought on by his engagement with a wide variety of problems, methodologies, and frameworks. His willingness to draw on the works of a vast panoply of thinkers, only some of whom were ordinarily-considered philosophers, further bolstered his interdisciplinary charm. This open-mindedness to sources—that is, a willingness to deploy useful tools regardless of their origins—led Rorty to bring into conversation writers whom ordinary academic good taste and scholarly common sense insisted should be held apart. In his work, and oftentimes in the span of just a page or two, readers find engagement with such varied (and often dubiously-paired) thinkers as Foucault and Carnap, Derrida and Quine, Dewey and Aristotle.
