A number of wide-ranging interviews with Richard Rorty can be found here:
‘A Talent For Bricolage’
‘Realists—Grow Up’
‘The Next Left’
‘North Atlantic Thinking’
‘Without illusion, but with conviction’
Rorty is laconic throughout, with my favourite example being when Joshua Knobe asks him why Putnam thinks he is a relativist: “Beats me. I wrote an article about it, but that was as far as I got.”
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Thanks, these look good. The first interview was excellent. The fifth has a drawing of a topless woman riding a hippopotamus, so I figure it’s already been worth my time.
Somehow, I missed that on my first read-through. I think I mistook it for a kitschy French advert and just glazed over. Apparently it’s by the ‘suprealist’ artist Leonhard Lapin.
Thanks for the links!
Thanks for these. I always enjoyed Rorty’s amazing sense of humor, not a small aspect to his ironic thought. In particular from these the statement to his Lacanian interviewer J. Ayerza…
“RR: Have to wonder why you Lacanians have to give silence special names, make it an object…”
…is more than amusing when you picture it said in that, as you say, laconic drawl of his.
Yes, you can just imagine all the inflections and the tone of voice he said that in. There’s something mesmeric about that Rortian drone.
I love it. It cracks me up. So slightly dismissive, so billowed with sighs and huffs (are you really going to make me think through that again?), and so ready to admit that he doesn’t understand something (sometimes used as a devestating insult – if someone like me is doesn’t understand it, it probably isn’t substantive – sometimes used as an uncommonly humble confession (I still marvel that he admits that he was wrong on some rather profound aspects of his thought). The guy was just marvelous.
I wish there were more recorded interviews (and the discussion you put up with him and Davidson so long ago was precious).