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  • Rorty at Princeton*
  • Jeffrey Stout (bio)

Once a year the Daily Princetonian used to publish lists of the top-rated courses. When I arrived at Princeton in 1972 to begin my graduate work in religion, Dick Rorty's lecture course on metaphysics and epistemology routinely appeared on the list of the top-ten courses with enrollment over fifty. Two of my friends signed up to take the course. The graduate student precept was held in Dick's office in McCosh Hall. Dick was so lacking in social skills, according to my friends, that when the fifty minutes of discussion concluded, he didn't know how to signal this, and would simply swivel in his chair and begin working at his desk.

Knowing what I was working on, my friends advised me to attend one of Dick's lectures on Wilfrid Sellars. Dick had been too ill to give the previous lecture. He distributed a mimeographed version of the material he had planned to cover in that lecture, saying, "Here's what I would have said, minus the verisimilitude." After reading through that handout and listening to the lecture he gave that day, I went to the Philosophy reading room in Firestone Library, and I read through all of Dick's articles. This was a few months before beginning my dissertation on the "is-ought" problem.

I had already taken Victor Preller's seminar on religious language and knowledge, which consisted of eight weeks of Sellars, two weeks of Quine, and two weeks of wondering what the philosophy of religion would look like without either the Myth of the Given or the Dogmas of Empiricism. I had also taken Gilbert Harman's seminar on ethical theory, and realized that he too was trying to combine ideas from Quine and Sellars in a way that was relevant to my interests. I later discovered that Cornel West and Robert Brandom were thinking along similar lines, but under Dick's influence. Meanwhile, I was studying Hegel with David Hoy and reading a lot of Donald Davidson, David Lewis, and Saul Kripke, not to mention a lot of theologians and theorists of religion. [End Page 29]

Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but there were so many suns rising! The age of analysis had suddenly given way to an array of apparently incompatible philosophical systems. The task of determining where the hidden but ultimately compatible truths might lie in all of this remarkable outpouring of philosophical creativity was daunting, and nearly everybody simplified the task by dismissing at least some of the freshly spawned systems as unworthy of serious attention.

Dick was preoccupied with a cluster of commitments and arguments that he had extracted from his own previous work in the philosophy of mind and from key articles by Quine, Sellars, and Davidson. He set himself the task of restating those commitments and arguments in a vocabulary designed to render salient their resemblance to passages in Hegel's Phenomenology, the first division of Heidegger's Being and Time, Dewey's The Quest for Certainty, and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. The common element in all of these works, he argued, is a social-pragmatic conception of normativity that is at odds with Cartesianism in all its forms.

Many others, at roughly the same time, decided to cast their lot with Kripke, Lewis, or both. This entailed a severe downgrading of Quine and Sellars and a very different view of Davidson's importance from Dick's. The resulting schism in Princeton philosophy always struck me as unfortunate, but one needs to keep it in mind when addressing the topic of Rorty at Princeton. Scott Soames's history of analytic philosophy shows how things look if one takes Kripke to be the center of the firmament. Bob Brandom's work shows how things look if one places Sellars at the center while nonetheless according considerable significance to Davidson, Lewis, and Kripke. How many readers of Brandom's Making It Explicit have gotten all the way to the Lewis and Kripke material one can only guess.

Dick, of course, became the chief canonizer of Quine and Sellars at just the moment when they were being downgraded...

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