Se voce esta pensando em comprar a recem lançada biografia do Rorty, recomendo ler a resenha abaixo que saiu na The Economist.
RICHARD RORTY, who died last year at 75, was one of the most talked-about thinkers in America. Every professional philosopher in the English-speaking world had to grapple with his magnum opus, “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature”, published in 1979. But the reason why he was a superstar is that it was not only philosophers who read him. Students and teachers in many other branches of the humanities fell under his spell. This wide appeal was partly due to his approachable style, trenchant polemics and breadth of learning. It also helped that he attacked philosophy as a puffed-up pretender with no monopoly on deep truths.
In fact, for Rorty there weren’t really any deep truths at all. He saw himself as a pragmatist in the American tradition of William James and (especially) John Dewey. Pragmatists say that beliefs should be judged by their usefulness, and not by any supposed correspondence with an ultimate reality that lurks behind the landscape of everyday life. This sort of pragmatism—or so Rorty argued in “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature”—demotes philosophy to just one form of edifying conversation among many.
In 1982, three years after the book was published, Rorty left the philosophy department of Princeton University to become a multidisciplinary professor of the humanities at the University of Virginia. In 1998 he packed his bags again to teach comparative literature at Stanford University in California.
This was not a particularly eventful life. Rorty’s parents were left-wing anti-communist intellectuals. He was precocious and began studies at the University of Chicago at the age of 15. He was married, divorced and remarried. There were rows with departmental colleagues. He wrote a lot (in newspapers and magazines, as well as academic journals and books) and died of cancer. If Neil Gross, who is an American sociologist, had set out to write a traditional biography of Rorty, he would not have had a gripping tale to tell. Instead he has used Rorty as a case study in the sociological analysis of academe.
In theory, Rorty is a promising subject for such treatment. Here was a star of the dominant “analytical” movement in philosophy who, it seemed, suddenly turned on his colleagues and became an eclectic iconoclast.
Why did he do it? Unfortunately for anyone who is not a professional sociologist, Mr Gross is more interested in distinguishing subtly different ways of answering this question than he is in the question itself. And his writing seems almost designed to make pedestrian generalisations sound as if they are insights: “As thinkers move across the life course and are affiliated with different institutions, they may pick up from some of them identity elements that they integrate into their self-concept narratives.”
Almost by accident, Mr Gross does shed some light on Rorty’s development. He shows that his estrangement from his colleagues at Princeton was no volte-face but a natural evolution from his early studies in Chicago and graduate work at Yale. The two chapters about Rorty’s parents may be useful raw material for scholars of the minor figures in pre-war intellectual life. Similarly, information about the minutiae of tenure decisions and rivalries in leading philosophy departments will be of interest to institutional historians.
But none of this is woven into an engaging narrative here. Those who agree with Rorty's critique of philosophy will be tempted to conclude from this volume that sociology is even worse.
