Draw Breath

I am so sorry to hear, via Crooked Timber, that Richard Rorty died two days ago. Although I have never discussed Rorty's ideas in publishable work I did write a chapter on him in my PhD thesis (which counts, at best, as juvenilia) and have always wanted to draw out some ideas on him. I might do yet of course, but - and this is a rare thing to say - I'll miss reading new work by him.

All of which is a bit strange to say because the different things that I write are almost entirely removed from the things that Rorty was interested in. Nonetheless, he was an intriguing and unfairly overlooked figure in academic philosophy. And his deceptively easy prose made him about the most challenging figure to teach in contemporary political philosophy (something I'm not sure I ever did well) in that students were generally persuaded by him but hadn't accounted for the nuances of what he had to say. Which is a roundabout way of saying that I didn't quite get him...

Rorty had a huge number of strings to his bow,¹ including an excellent essay on prospects for the American left (he was, as the wonderful term goes, raised a red diaper baby), but his primary focus as an academic was on what it is that philosophy does.

I'm off to see Philip Pettit's inaugural Edmund Burke lecture in Trinity College Dublin at 18:00 this evening. He'll be speaking on "Democracy: Fashions, Failures and Fantasies." I might be wrong, but the title suggests he'll be making a comment or two on the failures and fallacies of democracy-by-invasion.

Pettit is best known in my sort of crowd for his philosophical work on republicanism (in the proper sense, not that expressed by most of the commenters on Slugger), but I've read more of his work on groups, responsibility and the discursive dilemma.