Abstract
It is widely agreed that Rorty’s enduring influence is due not only to his ideas but also to how he presented them in writing. This chapter is the first comprehensive account of how that writing worked. It is comprehensive in that it takes into account both Rorty’s individual style – which was expressed by Rorty across different genres and throughout his career, including his metaphysical, analytic, and pragmatist periods – as well a particular genre of philosophical writing that he invented in the late 1970s and is associated with the most. The chapter argues that the character of that particular genre, whose paradigmatic examples include essays such as “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing” and the lectures comprising Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, was determined mainly by a specific therapeutic goal Rorty wanted to achieve through his writing. That is, to weaken the foundationalist intuitions Rorty thought to underlay mainstream philosophy and encourage the pragmatist intuitions he advocated for.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
While this must have been in large part due to Rorty’s natural talent, a significant influence here were also his parents. Exceptionally good writers themselves (with Rorty’s father, James Rorty, being an accomplished poet and a journalist), both were keen readers of Rorty’s texts and happy to offer their advice (Gross 2008, pp. 30–105).
- 2.
- 3.
Note that I understand here the terms “continental” and “analytic genre” in terms of statistical tendencies. That is, that an average person identifying as continental or analytic writes in a certain manner, not that every person identifying as either will write in a given way. There are continental thinkers who often use humor in their writings (Derrida) and there are analytic thinkers who write in a cryptic and meandering way (here Cavell comes to mind). Still, on average, analytic writers are less cryptic and meandering than continental writers, while the mood of continental writing seems to be, on average, more serious than light (cf. Beaney 2013, p. 24).
- 4.
Alas, Rorty’s rational reconstructions were usually read as historical reconstructions, resulting in his undeserved reputation as a pathological misreader, perhaps most famously expressed in the so-called Rorty Factor, proposed by Dennett: “take whatever Rorty says about anyone’s views and multiply it by .742” to derive what they actually said (Dennett 1982, p. 349). It has to be stressed here, though, that while in his mature period, Rorty preferred rational to historical reconstructions, he still did see a great philosophical value in the former (Rorty 1984). Not to mention that in his earlier period, he did produce quite a few historical reconstructions himself (with his PhD dissertation being a particularly good example), being quite well prepared for the job thanks to the thorough historical education he received at Chicago and Yale (Gross 2008, pp. 84–164). For more on that education and Rorty’s kinds of reading, see Malecki 2014.
- 5.
Parts of this paper were written during my research stay at the The Ruhr-University Bochum in 2018. I would like to thank the university for its support and my host there, Sebastian Berg, for his hospitality. I would also like to thank Martin Müller and Chris Voparil for their comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.
References
Barthes, Roland. 2010. The reality effect. In The rustle of language. Trans. Richard Howard, 141–148. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Beaney, Michael. 2013. What is analytic philosophy? In The Oxford handbook of the history of analytic philosophy. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199238842.013.0039.
Bernstein, Richard J. 1986. Philosophical profiles: Essays in a pragmatic mode. Cambridge: Polity.
Blackburn, Simon. 2001. The professor of complacence: Rorty and his critics edited by Robert B. Brandom. New Republic 4518: 39–42.
Curtis, William M. 2020. Rhetoric between philosophy and poetry. In A companion to Rorty, ed. Alan Malachowski, 119–134. Malden/Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118972199.ch7.
Dennett, Daniel C. 1982. Comments on Rorty. Synthese 53(2): 349–356.
Dennett, Dennett. 2014. Foreword. In Mind, language, and metaphilosophy: Early philosophical papers, ed. Richard Rorty, vii. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Estor, Annemarie. 2004. ‘We murder to dissect’: A philosophy of science in Lyrical Ballads. A Natural Delineation of Human Passions, January, 103–113. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004334489_009.
Gross, Neil. 2008. Richard Rorty: The making of an American philosopher. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Haack, Susan. 1996a. As for that phrase ‘studying in a literary spirit...’. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 70(2): 57–75. https://doi.org/10.2307/3131039.
Haack, Susan. 1996b. ‘We pragmatists…’; Peirce and Rorty in conversation. Agora 15(1): 53–68.
Hall, David L. 1994. Richard Rorty: Prophet and poet of the new pragmatism. SUNY series in philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Horton, John. 2001. Irony and commitment: An irreconcilable dualism of modernity. In Richard Rorty: Critical dialogues, ed. Matthew Festenstein and Simon Thompson, 15–28. Cambridge, UK/Malden: Polity.
Hughes, Rebecca. 1996. English in speech and writing: Investigating language and literature. Interface. London/New York: Routledge.
Hunt, Lynn. 2007. Inventing human rights: A history. New York: Norton & Co.
Kelly, Aine. 2008. The provocative polemics of Richard Rorty. Minerva 12: 78–101.
Kelly, Aine. 2010. Stylists in the American grain. Wallace Stevens, Stanley Cavell and Richard Rorty. European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy II (II–2). https://doi.org/10.4000/ejpap.918.
Koopman, Colin. 2020. The uses of philosophy after the collapse of metaphysics. In A companion to Rorty, 100–118. Malden/Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118972199.ch6.
Lewis, David K. 1986. On the plurality of worlds. Oxford/New York: Blackwell.
Mahon, Áine. 2014. The ironist and the romantic: Reading Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell. Bloomsbury Studies in American Philosophy. New York: Bloomsbury.
Malecki, Wojciech. 2012. On being loyal (to the wrong Hegel): Rorty and Royce. In Josiah Royce for the twenty-first century: Historical, ethical, and religious interpretations, ed. Kelly A. Parker and Krzysztof Piotr Skowroński, 255–270. Lanham: Lexington Books.
Malecki, Wojciech. 2014. On a man who died from reading too much Heidegger, or Richard Rorty as a reader. Contemporary Pragmatism 11(1): 115–129.
McClean, David E. 2014. Richard Rorty, liberalism and cosmopolitanism. Studies in American Philosophy 2. London/Brookfield: Pickering & Chatto.
Mendieta, Eduardo. 2005. Introduction. In Take care of freedom and truth will take care of itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty, xi–xxx. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Metcalf, Stephen. 2007. Richard Rorty. Slate, June 18, 2007. http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2007/06/richard_rorty.html?via=gdpr-consent&via=gdpr-consent
Pinker, Steven. 2011. The better angels of our nature: Why violence has declined. New York: Viking.
Putnam, Hilary. 1990. Realism with a human face, ed. James Conant. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Romano, Carlin. 2012. America the philosophical. New York: Knopf.
Rorty, Richard. 1956. The concept of potentiality. Ph.D. diss., Yale University.
Rorty, Richard. 1965. Mind-body identity, privacy, and categories. Review of Metaphysics 19(1): 24–54. https://doi.org/revmetaph1965191159.
Rorty, Richard. 1976. Realism and reference. The Monist 59(3): 321–340. https://doi.org/10.5840/monist19765935.
Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the mirror of nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1980. Pragmatism, relativism, and irrationalism. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 53(6): 717–738. https://doi.org/10.2307/3131427.
Rorty, Richard. 1982. Consequences of pragmatism: Essays 1972–1980. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1984. The historiography of philosophy: Four genres. In Philosophy in history: Essays on the historiography of philosophy, ed. Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner, 49–75. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1989a. Contingency, irony, and solidarity. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1989b. Review of interpreting across boundaries: New essays in comparative philosophy, by Gerald James Larson and Eliot Deutsch. Philosophy East and West 39 (3): 332–337. https://doi.org/10.2307/1399454.
Rorty, Richard. 1991a. Essays on Heidegger and others. Philosophical papers, vol. 2. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1991b. Objectivity, relativism, and truth. Philosophical papers, vol. 1. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1993. Centers of moral gravity commentary on Donald Spence’s ‘the hermeneutic turn’. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 3(1): 21–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/10481889309538957.
Rorty, Richard. 1994. Tales of two disciplines. Callaloo 17(2): 575. https://doi.org/10.2307/2931782.
Rorty, Richard. 1995a. Deconstruction. In The Cambridge history of literary criticism: Volume 8: From formalism to poststructuralism, ed. Raman Selden, 166–196. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521300131.009.
Rorty, Richard. 1995b. Philosophy and the future. In Rorty and pragmatism: The philosopher responds to his critics, ed. Herman Saatkamp Jr., 68–71. Nashville/London: Vanderbilt.
Rorty, Richard. 1995c. Response to Richard Bernstein. In Rorty and pragmatism: The philosopher responds to his critics, ed. Herman Saatkamp Jr and Herman Saatkamp Jr, 68–71. Nashville/London: Vanderbilt.
Rorty, Richard. 1997. Can philosophers help their clients? The New Leader 1997.
Rorty, Richard. 1998a. Achieving our country: Leftist thought in twentieth-century America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1998b. Truth and progress. Philosophical papers, vol. 3. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1999. Philosophy and social hope. London: Penguin Books Limited.
Rorty, Richard. 2000. Is ‘cultural recognition’ a useful concept for leftist politics? Critical Horizons 1(1): 7–20. https://doi.org/10.1163/156851600510390.
Rorty, Richard. 2005. Take care of freedom and truth will take care of itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 2006a. Looking back at ‘literary theory’. In Comparative literature in an age of globalization, ed. Haun Saussy, 63–67. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 2006b. Pragmatism as anti-authoritarianism. In A companion to pragmatism, ed. John R. Shook and Joseph Margolis, 7–20. Malden: Blackwell.
Rorty, Richard. 2007a. Philosophy as cultural politics: Philosophical papers, vol. 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 2007b. Dewey and Posner on pragmatism and moral progress. University of Chicago Law Review 74(3). https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclrev/vol74/iss3/3
Rorty, Richard. 2010a. Intellectual autobiography. In The philosophy of Richard Rorty, ed. Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn. Chicago/La Salle: Open Court.
Rorty, Richard. 2010b. Redemption from egotism: James and proust as spiritual exercises. In The Rorty reader, ed. Christopher J. Voparil and Richard J. Bernstein, 389–406. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.
Rorty, Richard. 2014. Mind, language, and metaphilosophy: Early philosophical papers, ed. Stephen Leach and James Tartaglia. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 2016. Philosophy as poetry. Page-Barbour Lectures for 2004. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Rorty, Richard. 2020. On philosophy and philosophers: Unpublished papers, 1960–2000, ed. W.P. Malecki and Christopher J. Voparil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Savoy, Jacques. 2020. Machine learning methods for stylometry: Authorship attribution and author profiling. Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53360-1.
Shusterman, Richard. 2011. Somatic style. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 69(2): 147–159.
Vieth, Andreas, ed. 2005. Richard Rorty: His philosophy under discussion. Münstersche Vorlesungen Zur Philosophie 8; 8th Münster Lectures on Philosophy. Frankfurt/Lancaster: Ontos.
Voparil, Christopher J. 2006. Richard Rorty: Politics and vision. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.
West, Cornel. 1989. The American evasion of philosophy: A genealogy of pragmatism/Cornel west. The Wisconsin Project on American Writers. Madison.: University of Wisconsin Press.
Recommended Literature for Further Reading
Olson, Gary A., und Richard Rorty. 1989. Social construction and composition theory: A conversation with Richard Rorty. Journal of Advanced Composition 9(1/2): 1–9.
Rorty, Richard. 1989. The philosophy of the oddball. The New Republic, June 1989.
Rorty, Richard. 1996. Remarks on deconstruction and pragmatism. In Deconstruction and pragmatism, ed. Simon Critchley and Chantal Mouffe, 13–17. London/New York: Routledge.
Wenning, Mario, Alex Livingston, David Rondel, und Richard Rorty. 2006. An interview with Richard Rorty. Gnosis 8(1): 54–59.
These four lesser-known texts contain some of Rorty’s most interesting remarks on philosophical writing, writing in general, and the style of other authors, including Cavell, Foucault, and Derrida.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Section Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Malecki, W.P. (2023). Rorty’s Kind of Writing: Style, Genre, and Rhetoric. In: Müller, M. (eds) Handbuch Richard Rorty. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-16253-5_69
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-16253-5_69
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer VS, Wiesbaden
Print ISBN: 978-3-658-16252-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-658-16253-5
eBook Packages: Social Science and Law (German Language)