An appreciative (perhaps generous) review:
I’m also a bit chagrined to now acknowledge that the definition in my Philosophical Lexicon of ‘ a rortiori’ (adj. ‘for even more obscure and fashionable Continental reasons’) has probably contributed to a caricature of Rorty’s work that is all too convenient: an idea of the analytic philosopher turned Continental belle-lettrist. On the contrary, as this volume shows, Rorty was always keenly alert to the historically-blinkered vision of his fellow analytic philosophers, and after his ‘Continental turn’ he continued to compose masterful analyses of later stars of the analytic discipline – Kripke, McDowell, Mackie, Hacking, Kim, Brandom, Davidson, Searle, Nagel, Goldman and Fodor, to name a few highlights – well seasoned with his growing confidence about how they fit into the larger project of human inquiry. His 1994 paper, ‘The Current State of Philosophy in the United States’ should be required reading for every graduate or prospective graduate student in philosophy in the US (and elsewhere), since it’s full of observations that I believe are as true today as they were twenty-seven years ago: for instance, about the attempt by philosophers to escape the humanities and join forces with the sciences; about the gravitational attraction of problems that can be addressed with little or no historical understanding; and about the pinched perspective on the issues that has resulted from this trend.
Earlier posts on Rorty and his legacy.
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