Poetry
McMullen, Richard E.
snobbish, incommunicable interests. Such as an interest in wild orchids. As a teen-ager, Rorty took great pride in being able to find and identify (by their Latin names) seventeen species of...
...Rorty moved on to a two-year teaching stint at Wellesley...
...He remained there for twenty-one years...
...It is true that Rorty took a few knocks, but the vast majority of the philosophers whom I have talked with consider Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature a not-so-minor classic...
...At the same time, he was circling back and becoming deeply absorbed in a study of John Dewey, the philosopher who was "always in the air" of his parents' home...
...He couldn't open them...
...How so...
...Push with chest, arms, head...
...The others, he noticed, made all their things so heavy, so tight...
...save in the sense that he would eventually conclude that overarching theories are both illusory and unnecessary...
...I wanted to find some intellectual or aesthetic framework which would let me--in a thrilling phrase which I came across in Yeats--"hold reality and justice in a single vision...
...In a recent telephone interview, Robert Pipin, chairperson of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, told me that he believed this book would be read by students for the next fifty to one hundred years...
...The philosopher Richard Bernstein called this work, "one of the most important and challenging books to be published by an American philosopher in the last few decades...
...His fresh start began in 1982 when Rorty accepted the appointment he currently holds in the Department of the Humanities at the University of Virginia...
...n Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty argues that philosophers have been entranced by images and metaphors which much sooner than later became accepted as literal truths...
...Rorty came to the University of Chicago looking for an absolute which would enable him to justify one side of himself to the other...
...He never got done...
...As an undergraduate, Rorty threw himself into the study of the great absolutists of Western culture, but he never found the overarching theory that he was looking for...
...As a teen-ager, Rorty took great pride in being able to find and identify (by their Latin names) seventeen species of wild orchid...
...As Rorty recounts it, at this time the judgment at Princeton and 98 percent of the philosophy departments around the country was that these were not serious philosophers...
...He was neverthrough...
...In 1961, the preeminent classicist Gregory Vlastos recruited Rorty to teach Aristotle at Princeton...
...Without the notion of the mind as mirror, the notion of knowledge as accuracy of representation would not have suggested itself...
...In the seventies, Rorty developed a keen interest in continental philosophy, especially in the writings of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida...
...The picture which holds traditional philosophy captive is that of mind as a great mirror containing various representations-some accurate, some not--and capable of being studied by pure, nonempirical methods...
...As Rorty quite candidly puts it, "I wanted a way to be both an intellectual and spiritual snob and a friend of humanity--a nerdy recluse and a fighter for justice...
...Having taken both his bachelor's and master' s degrees at the University of Chicago, Rorty moved on to Yale to do his doctoral work in philosophy...
...Commonweal 6 May 1994:13...
...And it ought to be, as it was instrumental in breaking the stranglehold that the analytic approach to philosophy had upon the discipline at that time...
...I was," he comments, "uneasily aware that there was something a bit dubious about this esotericism--this interest in socially useless flowers...
...Pull with both hands, leaning back, heels dug in...
...At a loss for colleagues with sympathetic interests, he put out feelers for another position, preferably one in a department other than philosophy...
...Rorty continues: At fifteen I escaped from the bullies who regularly beat me up on the playground of my high school (bullies who, I assumed, would somehow wither away once capitalism had been overcome) by going off to the so-called Hutchins College of the University of Chicago...
...Rorty came to prominence in the late seventies with the publication of his epiphanic Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature...
...Screw and screw them on...
...After four years and a dissertation titled, "The Concept of Potentiality in Aristotle and the Seventeenth Century Rationalists," Dr...
...He couldn't shut them...
...Unscrew and unscrew them...
...When quizzed about the reception of this book, which has already been translated into six languages, Rorty replied, "Though disliked by most of my fellow philosophy professors, this book had enough success among nonphilosophers to give me a selfconfidence I had previously lacked...
...Insofar as I had any project in mind, it was to reconcile Trotsky and the orchids...
...The doors...
...Without this latter notion, the strategy common to Descartes and Kant--getting more accurate representations by inspecting, repairing, and polishing the mirror so to speak--would not Richard E. McMullen He Noticed The tops...
...Rorty deconstructs a number of these guiding images, the most important of which is the picture of the mind as a great mirror: It is pictures rather than propositions, metaphors rather than statements, which determine most of our philosophical convictions...
Vol. 121 • May 1994 • No. 9
