Content area
Full Text
This review essay discusses Ronald A. Kuiper's book Richard Rorty (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013).
James Joyce once quipped that he wrote Ulysses to keep the critics busy for three hundred years. Given that work's length and notorious complexity, we can safely predict that Joyce scholars will not be short of work for at least a few generations to come. Some philosophers have also managed to secure a long afterlife for themselves, similarly employing the Joycean strategies of sheer volume and difficulty (think of Heidegger and Denida) to create an ongoing cottage industry of exegetes, interpreters, and intellectual under-laborers required as basic guides through their primary texts.
If Richard Roity's work continues to survive and flourish in the arena of professional philosophy, it will not be for these reasons. His writing is clear and elegant, utterly shorn of fussy, intellectual jargon, and any motivated graduate student could easily work through his published books and major articles in a good summer. No: Roity's contributions will live on because, in sum, he articulates what has mattered in philosophy and cultural politics in the last century like no other "humanistic intellectual," all the while helping us to think about who we are and what we might do with our lives in a strikingly original fashion. Given the accessibility of his work, accordingly, the best introduction to Rorty is Rorty himself. But the second best introduction would be to read Ronald Kuiper's new book, published in Bloomsbury's "Contemporary American Thinkers" series.
In any slim, introductory account of a serious thinker's work, questions of what to include or exclude are always particularly urgent. In this case, Kuiper's decision to say more about fewer topics, rather than offer a superficial gloss of many, is a wise one. Rorty was simply involved in too many conversations with too many interlocutors to cover them all responsibly, so despite how fascinating Roity's exchanges with other contemporary thinkers were (from Norris to Habermas, Taylor to Putnam), coverage of these debates was quite rightly left on the cutting-room floor.
This is not to say, however, that Kuipers does not situate Rorty within the traditions of American pragmatism and analytic philosophy. On the contrary, the task of clarifying Roity's philosophical relationships with Dewey, Sellars, Quine,...