richard rorty is dead

Music: Killing Joke: Willful Days (1995) Just minutes ago I discovered that on Friday, American pragmatist philosopher and liberal ironist Richard Rorty died of pancreatic cancer. Amazingly, Rorty's Wikipedia entry already reflects his death; if you're not familiar with his work, I think the entry does a fair job of characterizing his contributions to philosophy and liberal thought.

Largely at the behest of one of my mentors, Edward Schiappa, I read a great deal of Rorty's work during my graduate education. Rorty's thought was very influential to my own work. Although I am not as moved by the pragmatist line as I once was, my first book draws liberally from Rorty's view of language, and by extension, Donald Davidson's work on events and action theory. Rorty's work was always refreshingly frank and unflinchingly bold, especially when he took up the political; even when he was ridiculously wrong he always argued so damn well you just wanted to give into his claims for their elegance.

Despite the genius of his very good book, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, I think the work of his that influenced me the most is a lesser-known essay titled "Trotsky and the Orchids," which is collected in Wild Orchids and Trotsky: Messages from American Universities, edited by Mark Edmundson, and later reprinted in one of Rorty's own essay collections. What is often more helpful and instructive to me about this so-called life of the mind are role models who demonstrate an attitude toward living, scholars who evince visions of community that are hopeful and humane. You can read the essay online here. If you don't find this essay's attitude toward scholarship compelling, then you're probably better off working a more mainstream job or better served going to business school.