Richard Rorty, "What Can We Hope For?: Essays on Politics" (Princeton UP, 2023)
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who's the editor of a book by my favorite philosopher ever, Richard Rorty. And it's a book with short essays on politics called What Can We Hope For? Chris, thank you for being here. Thank you, Kai. It's great to be here and appreciate the opportunity to talk about Rorty. Yeah, maybe we can ask the biggest question right from the start.

what can we hope for and what is like what is relevant for politics or discussions around politics today? Yeah, sure. I mean, for people who are not academics and philosophers who aren't familiar with Rorty's writings, one of the ways that he got into the public consciousness was

around the time of the 2016 presidential election in the U.S. And there were these passages from a book that was published in 1998 by Rorty called Achieving Our Country. And this basically 20-year-old text led to some quotes going viral on social media about how Rorty had predicted that

the rise of a strong man leader like Donald Trump. And, you know, the book started going out of print every week as people were buying it. And it really led to bringing Richard Rorty to a popular consciousness as a pragmatic philosopher who seemed to be

uncannily, you know, relevant in terms of the way that he had predicted a kind of backlash to globalization that over the course of 20 years or so would lead to the rise, not only in the United States, but around the globe of strongman type authoritarian leaders, a rightward shift in the culture and, you know, a certain kind of populism that he thought was going to

set back many of the gains around gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality that had been made since the 1990s. And I only learned that by reading your introduction to the book. I'm not on social media and it was completely new to me that Rorty became a social media phenomenon.

Like, what was his prediction? And why do you think, I know that it had something to do with what he called the academic left and what he found problematic about them? Yeah, so the book in 1998, Achieving Our Country, you know, part of it was an attempt to go back to a hopeful vision of the US and what it was.

has the potential to become, where he talks about figures like Walt Whitman from the 19th century and John Dewey, a pragmatist philosopher that Rorty identified with. So there was this hopeful vision, but it was in response to what he took to be the limitations of

a kind of new left or an academic left that during the 1990s had gotten increasingly radicalized, he thought, and increasingly theoretical in terms of being detached from everyday electoral politics. And I was a graduate student myself in the 1990s. I remember this distinctly where

The efforts among intellectuals on the left were about deconstruction and critiquing, you know, patriarchy and a kind of, you know, vision of capitalism that was very theoretically sophisticated and hard to translate into everyday politics. I mean, so much so that leftists at the time almost took pride in

in being above boring electoral politics of voting and changing laws. We were going to rebel against the system, overthrow patriarchy. And he perceived at the time that there was a downside here. And the downside were basically two. One was the detachment of the left from concrete efforts to reform democracy.

the US from within. So they had just gotten off into their ivory tower, patting themselves on the back for increasingly sophisticated critiques. So they're detached from everyday politics. And he saw a shift away from a focus on economic inequality and injustice in the gap between the rich and the poor, and instead a focus on culture and identity.

And this was really what he saw into the future. He said, you know, the neglect of the economic is basically going to come back to haunt the left. And this becomes his prediction of the rise of Donald Trump. I mean, I can read just a couple of sentences from that Achieving Our Country book, which

where he talks about a bottom-up populist revolt. So here's a quote from Rorty, quote, "The non-suburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strong man to vote for, someone willing to assure them that once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.

So you see in that the kind of anti-intellectualism, distrust of politicians and bureaucracy in Washington, D.C. in the U.S. But then he continued in the prediction, quote, the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, by homosexuals will be wiped out.

Jocular contempt for women would come back into fashion and all the resentment, which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet. And this is, you know, his way of, at that time, it was largely ignored as Rorty being out of touch, but his seeing that the impact of globalization and

on, you know, workers. I mean, in particular, the mass of like white ethnic workers in the middle parts of the United States, not the coastal elites, were going to suffer and that nobody was listening to them. And the strongman leader, and of course, this has happened in the US and elsewhere in Western Europe and Central Europe, would sort of, you know, make a show of

being their spokesperson and listening to them while the rest of the left had neglected, you know, the workers and were more focused on race and gender and sexuality, which Rorty says these are all very important. But the backlash he predicted more or less came about in the terms that he, you know, described.

Yeah, it indeed sounds hauntingly contemporary. And what I like about Rorty is that he never stops at a critique, but always puts new suggestions forward. And one essay in your book is simply called Back to Class Politics.

And as old fashioned as this might sound, I think Rorty had a good point. Can you maybe elaborate a bit more about like his own vision for a better

more equipped left that could, yeah, tackle these issues better than maybe today's left can. Yeah, this is a good, you know, sort of motto for Vorti. I mean, his own politics where he described it in terms of the old left politics,

you know, the pre-1960s left that was really about labor unions, you know, legislation, the New Deal in the U.S., like the welfare state, basically, that came about, you know, after the Second World War. And his critique of these academic lefts, as I said, is that it had gotten focused on culture rather than economics. So, you

It's interesting how his talk about unions at the time seemed out of touch. And, you know, after the 1990s, there was a great decline in unions and their power. But now they're sort of coming back. You know, as many globalized corporations find them, whether it's Starbucks or, you know, the larger companies, even some of the big AI companies are dealing with it. He understood that

bringing economic inequality and insecurity and making that the centerpiece of, you know, what he calls political projects, rather than worrying about the philosophical principles, focusing on projects that are going to address that inequality and insecurity. And he thinks that by doing that or the mechanism for doing that,

is to create a kind of, and this I think is really the centerpiece of Rorty's positive vision, is understanding that we have to forge moral communities. And, you know, by that, he didn't mean a strong sense of community in terms of shared values. I mean, he was very much a pluralist and really understood community.

you know, value pluralism and irreconcilable differences in belief. But he thought a moral community that's simply based on the idea that we're willing to come to the aid of others when they're in need. That simple principle, he thought, would be the basis for

You know, a new understanding of we, you know, we Americans, we global citizens, you know, and that if we could just get people to care enough to help others when they're in need, that this could be the basis for growth.

a positive, you know, movement to remedy these forms of inequality and insecurity, which, you know, in particular, in terms of the gap between rich and poor have just, has just gotten worse since Rorty wrote. Yeah. I think it's very important that you emphasize it's not like paying off or trading off like class politics against like cultural politics, um,

Because Rotti engaged a lot with feminism, also with, like, minority issues. But, like, strategically, I think his vision was what can hold us together, the poor and...

weak against the strong and the rich in society. And I mean, that's, I think that's still as much as Rorty disagreed philosophically with Marxism. I think it's a fair, fair, strategically fair point in, in the, in the Marxist thought. Yeah. Okay. That wasn't the question. Sorry. No, but you're right. I think, you know,

From the point of view of this highly theoretical academic left, he seemed very simplistic. And still, I think some of his categories aren't nuanced enough. Like, for example, he tended to think of injustice and, you know, inequality in terms of two things, selfishness and sadism. So, you know, selfishness is...

a little more straightforward in terms of looking out for oneself and really not caring about the impact of one's actions on other people, on the environment, on the community, etc. But sadism was really his way of, again, sort of oversimplifying kinds of racial injustice, gender injustice around cruelty and bullying, you know, and that if we just

get people to, you know, be less cruel and not bully others that, you know, the strong overpowering the weak, that alleviating that would take care of the specific issues that we think of in terms of identity politics. Now, you know, that's not always the case and it oversimplifies, but at the same time, it's still, I think, a powerful message that,

that might not get us all the way to his vision of a just and classless society, but they seem more needful than ever. Yeah, sometimes one looks for a kind of sociological insights into structural inequalities. And I think peculiarly, Roti was never interested in sociology.

except from social theory maybe, but like in empirical social research, he kind of had no interest and no use, as you said. It's not, these are not categories in which he likes to think.

But maybe we can, because you said or you made the distinction between political projects and then kind of over philosophication about politics. And I mean, that's a very maybe controversial thing because you're a political theorist, a philosopher or a political philosopher.

But I also liked one essay title, First Projects, Then Principles. And I think it's like in a nutshell how Rorty thought about

politics and also i'm an educational philosopher also in education he said like don't over philosophize first we need like hands-on pedagogical solutions to improve schools and so on and so on and then we can think about what the big picture philosophically is maybe you can

tell a bit more about like the relation between philosophy on the one hand and then politics and actual um like what he also calls actual politics like the the doing of the stuff work management platforms endless onboarding it bottlenecks admin requests but what if things were different

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At Sierra, discover top workout gear at incredible prices, which might lead to another discovery. Your headphones haven't been connected this whole time. Awkward. Discover top brands at unexpectedly low prices. Sierra, let's get moving. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I mean, part of the reason why...

He didn't spend a lot of time with the kind of finely grained sociological analyses that you're talking about. I mean, he thought they were important and they should inform policy, et cetera. But again, he worried that if we only do that sort of analysis, we're not addressing the issue of how to get people to act, as you said. And that was his primary focus as a thinker was what are the

And again, this fits with this larger idea of pragmatism, something that is trying to start with experience, start with what we do, make it more intelligent rather than starting with philosophical principles or theories and then trying to make that practical. So you start where people are. So he was very I mean, there's two parts. One is the motivational part.

which we can come back to, but part of his emphasis on community and even taking pride in one's country, going back to that Achieving Our Country book, was that he thought one is more likely to act on behalf of others who are in need or on behalf of a country to make it better if you have an emotional connection to it.

So he focused a lot on the kinds of literature that would inspire people and the kind of stories about injustice that would move people because he thought that would be a lever to get people to act and not just analyze. So that's one piece. But the larger question that you raised is how he understood philosophy and its relation to politics. And this really is one of the

the focal points of his writing. And probably the easiest way to think about the distinction is that he sometimes would write philosophy with a capital P. And when he did that, he was talking about a dominant tradition of philosophy is having privileged access to

the way things are, you know, reality with a capital R, and that because of philosophy's special methods and tools and access to reality, it would yield truths about the world with a capital T. It would yield knowledge with a capital K. So you see all these capital. And his whole philosophical career was challenging that privileging of philosophy.

But at the same time, I mean, like John Dewey, one of his, you know, inspirations and heroes, he thought the task was to reconstruct philosophy so that it's not worried about what Dewey called the problems of philosophers. You know, how do we theorize truth and do a lot of high level metaphysical analysis that

is very detached from the real world. And how do we orient it toward, again, what do we call the social and moral problems of the day? So that was philosophy with a lowercase p, philosophy that was oriented to solving real problems, you know, to being accessible in the public realm. And part of that shift is to give up the idea that if we just get

truth or facts or rationality, right or correct, it's going to save us. And it's going to keep humans from their irrational and, you know, immoral tendencies. And he completely rejected that idea. You know, the philosophy isn't going to save us. He writes even in this book about it can't provide, quote, a bulwark against the forces of darkness. Right.

that what all the things going on in the world that we're worried about aren't going to be solved by, you know, better truth. I mean, better knowledge or clear idea of truth. It's going to be moving people to take action and getting them to feel connections to others. So projects, he thought, were

You know, practice it concrete agendas for political reform in the world and that you can get people to agree on a project like, OK, let's, you know, limit A.I.'s, you know, influence on human life without having them.

without needing them to agree about larger philosophical commitments or principles and that if we just stop debating the principles and focus on okay what projects can we unite and work together on uh that is going to get more action in the world and that really is you know it is his focus yeah roti was also accused of being like um

supporter or ancestor of the post-truth and alternative truth. I don't know. Should we call it a movement? Maybe it is a movement. Because you use the term so much and truth was, of course, one of Rorty's pet peeves. Maybe, what was his stance on

on truth in politics and, and maybe what's the difference also to like alternative facts, people. Right. I mean, this has become, I think in maybe 2019, like post-truth was like the word of the year, you know, for the Oxford, Oxford English dictionary. Um,

Right. It's sort of the idea that people have become sort of unmoored from truth and facts and reality and instead are using their, you know, existing emotional and political orientation to dictate the facts they believe in, as opposed to, you know, seeking truth and

you know, no matter what, and cutting through false belief. So this, you know, is connected to the rise of a kind of, you know, polarization and tribalism and politics where people are

getting news from places that affirm what they already believe and really not listening to anything on the other side. And we can get into analyses of echo chambers and epistemic bubbles where people don't get access to. But I think Rorty had a fundamental insight that helps us understand post-truth and alternative facts and these sorts of

you know, locutions that don't make a lot of sense based on the traditional understanding as truth, as timeless, eternal, you know, correct for all people in all places. What he understood, it's sort of about the relationship between community and knowledge or community and epistemology, to use the philosophical phrase. And that he understood that community's

that we're a part of, the cultures that we're a part of, the languages we speak, come first. So that rather than, you know, philosophical truth dictating what we're going to believe, people are acquiring beliefs in contexts that lead them in certain directions. And that if we want to get agreement, you know, public discourse that's productive, instead of trying to, you know,

double down on the need for truth, we have to address communal relations to others. And what's really happened in terms of this post-truth is that people no longer have the same access to knowledge. And because community relations have been severed,

Right. And in the United States, you have two political parties where Democrats don't want to spend time with Republicans and vice versa. And that once the communities get fractured and people aren't interacting with each other, learning from each other, just staying in communication or staying in the conversation, in Rorty's phrase,

You can never get agreement around facts or truth or have productive rational discourse until you repair the communal relations or the ethical relations between citizens. So as I said earlier, so much of his project was about trying to forge these moral communities that gives us, you know, a potential path for addressing post-truth issues.

as a problem of knowledge, that until we're willing to talk to those with whom we disagree most strongly and spend time with them and build some kind of relation or interaction where it isn't, you know, hatred and disgust, we're never going to get back to productive public discourse. So I think he had some great insights there that help us understand the

both the phenomenon of post-truth and alternative facts and, you know, a kind of remedy.

Yeah, absolutely. He always says truth is not a relation between the humans and the non-human reality, but between humans, one human and another human. And I completely agree. It's not only is Rorty not on the side of alternatives facts, he's also great. Once you accept that, as you said, you can actually analyze within his vocabulary, you can actually analyze

why alternative facts and post-truth came to so much power. Yeah.

Sorry, again, not a question, but I have another question. Because one issue or a political topic that is strangely absent in Rorty's thinking is any kind of environmentalism, climate crisis thinking. And I wanted to ask you why you think this is not of his concern?

Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, it's interesting to note that Rorty himself was an avid bird watcher. He spent a lot of time, you know, anytime he wasn't traveling and lecturing and being at the university in nature. And, you know, he prided himself on his ability to spot and name all sorts of exotic and rare birds.

you know, he wrote about as a child. I mean, he was somewhat, you know, lonely, solitary, only child who he said, you know, was bullied on the playground and that sort of thing for being nerdy.

He found, I think, refuge in nature and in a famous essay of his called Trotsky and the Wild Orchids. He took pride in being able to find, you know, these rare wild orchids in the woods outside of, you know, the town where he grew up and lived.

New Jersey. So he, as a person, had a deep connection with the environment, you know, and he actually cared a lot about it. So why does it not feature more prominently in his philosophical writings? You know, and it's hard to really explain. I mean, he had, I think he mentions it often,

as a problem, but he never goes into much depth. And he's worried about scarce resources globally and how the standard of living and way of life in Western countries is using up more than their share of resources. And that standard of living requires cheap goods produced locally.

by, you know, very poorly paid workers in parts of the developing world. So he was highly conscious of these problems, but he tended to think about, you know, again, back to the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, you know, selfishness and sadism. He tended to just think about

those larger, you know, categories. And they thought if you take care of selfishness, you know, or you take care of the strong overpowering the weak and rich multinational corporations exploiting resources, that that would take care of some of the environmental issues. They were sort of not on at the top of his list of, you know, the urgent political projects that,

And, you know, that's interesting. It's hard to explain it. Perhaps, you know, were he around today, it would be different. But he tended to think more in terms of human suffering, I think. Yeah, absolutely. Can I share my own interpretation of that? Because it kind of fits nicely to the truth discussion. Because I think if you take...

the climate crisis seriously, you cannot stop with relations between humans. You have to get to the non-human. And I think the problem is that Rorty always thought this leads to the direction to reality, truth, the unquestionable out there in the world. And

My way of explaining this absence is that he was afraid of that direction and therefore he kind of always shifted towards these human sides of the issues. Yeah, there's something to that. I mean, he certainly was, and people have written about this,

obsessed with the problems of capital P philosophy and not wanting the kind of intellectual privilege and cultural privilege that philosophy had and, you know, the Enlightenment period to continue because he thought it tended to, you know, denigrate philosophy.

the arts, you know, the things outside of the rigorous realm of logical, you know, symbolic, technical philosophy. But in his writings about moral communities, for example, he has an essay, Justice as a Larger Loyalty. He there talks about the importance of extending this circle of care, you know, the sphere of

beings that were willing to take action to help when they're in need. Extending it to, in a passage, he said, the cows and kangaroos and the trees, you know, all living things on the planet. So he did have that within his larger vision. But he also understood that, you know, in times of crisis, like if we think of the COVID pandemic situation,

these circles are going to constrict and people are going to worry less about, you know, the treatment of animals and more about, you know, helping their families survive. But he also thought when we get back to out of crisis situations, there would be these opportunities to expand it. And so I think he was aware of it and he did think,

folded into his larger vision but as you know it wasn't like a practical priority um in terms of his own you know activism yeah now we both love roti and only talk about what what's lacking and what is problematic but i think um it it uh it is connected to what you said that

frames these things maybe not so much as systemic things but in terms of cruelty and sadism and the relation to cows I think is precisely another good example it's not about like systematic environmental questions but enlarging like our solidarity or wish to be kind and not a source of

cruelty to cows, which is really cute, I think, but it also sounds a bit naive when you really, yeah, I don't know. There's a passage in his 1979 book, Philosophy in the Mirror of Nature, which is his, you know, kind of most famous and influential work of philosophy. There's a passage on

koalas, the koala bear and pigs. He writes about why is it that people build societies to protect koalas and then they slaughter and eat pigs without any moral qualms at all. And again, that's where he starts thinking about this circle of moral concern. And for Rorty,

it's all contingent, meaning that it's, you know, a product of historical and changeable factors not woven into the way things are. But he thought, you know, it's just because we view the features on a koala bear's face as more humanistic and we can relate to them better than a pig.

that, you know, it leads to this divide in terms of where we draw a line of moral concern. But he said that divide can easily be shifted if we take a different view of pigs or a different view of human marginalized and oppressed peoples that we, you know, think of as outside of our moral concern, another part of the world where we don't care about them. He thought all those things

are both limits to the capacity for human sympathy, but also things that are changeable. If we look at them differently and re-describe them,

we could expand. And that really is this idea of justice as a larger loyalty, expanding this community that we're loyal to and be willing to assist as far as possible to cover all living things on the planet. Yeah. Maybe we can talk about the book a bit more. I found it really interesting

nice. It's very accessible. The essays are fairly short. So that's like on roughly 200 pages, 18, 19 short essays. And you edited together with Wojciech Marecki. We should also mention that. Can you maybe tell us a bit about the history of the book? Why did it came out only now? Because Rotti died almost 20 years ago. Yeah, that's so...

Part of Rorty's legacy, and he wrote, you know, extremely prolifically in terms of his publications, was an archive of unpublished work that after he died, it kind of moved around, but it ended up at the University of California, Irvine in their critical theory archive. They also have the papers of Jacques Derrida and others. And

At a certain point, probably more than 10 years ago, Wojciech Malecki and another philosopher, Colin Koteman, we went to visit this archive. And there's something like 61 boxes, right, of unpublished papers. I mean, Rorty saved everything, it seems. Letters. He had, you know, articles that he wrote for his middle school newspaper when he was a teenager.

But we came across a very large number of unpublished philosophical writings. So in 2020, along with Wojciech Malecki, we published a book called On Philosophers and Philosophy, grabbing a drink of water, that included about 18 philosophical technical papers.

And there was a handful of other ones that didn't fit that volume that were more oriented toward a general audience and not a technical one. And they were more focused on politics. So we weren't sure what to do with those. And really, it took about 10 years of working through these essays and getting them into publishable form. Some things from the 1960s were, you know, had been done on typewriter, you

with Rorty's, you know, corrections and the margins. And so eventually I think we were contacted by Rob Tempio at Princeton University Press about whether, again, building on this interest in Rorty because of his so-called predictions of Trump and populism, is there, you know, enough material for volume on politics that,

So I think we have, there were four previously unpublished papers in this, what can we hope for volume? Others were published, but sometimes in obscure places that people don't have access to. So it seems both timely in terms of the interest in Rorty and justified in terms of there's new material here. And Rorty, he was sort of known for being critiqued from both the left and the right, right?

And no one was really happy with him. And he took that to be an indication that maybe he was on the right track if you get critiqued from both sides. So at a time of polarization and extremes, Rorty's ability to cut through issues, you know, to kind of critique both sides and to find these, you know, practical middle roads really seemed to be something lacking in recent years.

you know, years of both, you know, academic and political discourse. So we had some new material and there really seemed to be an interest. And I think Rorty's voice is missing, you know, on the contemporary scene. So this was a way to bring some of his ideas, even though he often was writing 20 years before, they often feel like they were written just, you know, last week and,

in terms of their ongoing relevance. Yeah, I can highly recommend the book. It's really, even though I was a fan before, I can say that it's often just a pleasure because the style is so vivid and it is pragmatic in

I find especially this volume, these short, sometimes very short essays, also very pragmatic in their kind of approach and style. So I can recommend to our listeners to have a look.

And maybe for the last few minutes, let's talk about you and as a Rorty scholar and political philosopher, maybe can you tell us how you became interested in Rorty and political theory?

Yeah, what role played ROTI for your own philosophical development? Yeah, great question. When I was a graduate student, and as I said, like the 1990s in New York City, the New School for Social Research

I first came across Rorty, and it was actually a sociology graduate seminar on postmodernism. And one of his essays had been included there because Rorty, for a time, was regarded as giving a kind of American version of postmodernism that had something in common with the philosophical view

critiques of Michel Foucault or Jacques Derrida. And Rorty, I think, did share their critiques of modernist, rationalist, Enlightenment thought. He called it the Cartesian, Kantian tradition of philosophy. But then Rorty

started to realize people were misunderstanding his politics and that his politics were very different from the radical deconstruction that, you know, the postmodernists were known for. So he articulated some of the political ideas we talked about today that had more in common with the old left and labor unions and so forth. So I started, I was interested in Rorty

but found myself always in argument with him and disagreeing that I thought he had great ideas, but he really wasn't thinking through and following what I took to be the implications. So I started out with intentions to write a dissertation in traditional political theory, maybe on Jean-Jacques Rousseau. But I just found whatever I wrote, I ended up arguing with Rorty.

So at a certain point I said, you know what, I have to just go with this and see where it leads. And I was fortunate at that time to be learning about pragmatism from Richard J. Bernstein, who by chance was Rorty's lifelong friend. They had met at the University of Chicago in the late 1940s when they were undergraduates. So Rorty was in person. Anytime he was in New York, he would come to one of Bernstein's seminars and

One day after we had been reading about pragmatism, we walked in and Rorty was sitting there in the classroom, you know, and Bernstein said, OK, go at him, ask him whatever you want. So I just found that Rorty was inspiring my thinking in lots of ways, but also I had deep disagreements with him. And working through that really led to my career in the sense of

finding a way to read Rorty that didn't end in frustration about his philosophical stances, but rather understood what he was trying to do in the world, as we discussed today, and move people to action. And the first few generations of philosophers who just interpreted his stances on truth and realism and metaphysics as standalone philosophical positions, they found him to be

silly sometimes and superficial. But by understanding that he was trying to think of philosophy in such a way that put politics first, helped me and hopefully others read Rorty in a more productive way, even if we, you know, we still have disagreements. So it really just became something I couldn't get away from in terms of my own thoughts. Yeah.

Yeah, one peculiar thing is that he was both kind of the leading figure in the revival of pragmatism and everyone else working on pragmatism hated him. That's also an interesting double dynamic. And you, I've read, have been called the peacemaker in pragmatism because you try to bridge the gaps. Maybe like...

What would you say is like Rorty's status in contemporary political theory or political philosophy? Is he like, do people do research on him in the US or is he widely known or is he maybe, which I think he himself would say,

also find very ironic and maybe even embrace is he maybe nowadays more known on social media for his political visions than in the academy yeah I mean this is part of the just the interesting story of Rorty's reception where

He had a bigger following outside of the U.S. than in the U.S. And part of that is because of the dominance of Anglo-American analytic philosophy as, you know, really the main tradition within mainstream philosophy. But his work, particularly I found like in Central Europe after, you know, the fall of the Berlin Wall and communism, that his work

ability to make philosophy relevant for politics and democracy led to a lot of interest in Rorty outside of the U.S. You know, most of his books are in 15 or 20 different languages. But in the U.S., for a long period, he was something of a pariah because he had

critiqued analytic philosophy from within, and he knew how to play the game, and he critiqued it extremely well. And that led to just deep resentment against Rorty in mainstream philosophy. But then also within the pragmatist tradition, you know, Rorty got so much credit for bringing this revival about in the 1980s, 1990s, that, you know, he got

too much attention and that leads people to sometimes get resentful. But his version of John Dewey or William James or pragmatism more broadly was different than, you know, the pragmatism that was most familiar to scholars of John Dewey, William James, Charles Sanders Peirce. So in the one sense, Rorty had updated pragmatism by taking on board the

contemporary philosophical developments like the linguistic turn that hadn't yet happened when the pragmatist wrote. And the flip side of that updating of the tradition felt to some as if he was betraying the tradition and losing some of his key commitments. So that led to resentment about Rorty from even within American pragmatism. So he really had a very

a strange existence as an academic where after 1982, he never worked in a philosophy department again. He was in, you know, he had a university professorship at the University of Virginia where he was outside of any department. And then at the end of his career, he taught at Stanford in comparative literature because of this dislike for him. But at the same time, over the last 10, 15 years,

People have started to read Rorty in a more nuanced and complex way and really understand the important things that he understood. And there has been a real, you know, outpouring of work on Rorty, even the last five years, like six or seven volumes of essays and number of monographs. There's a Richard Rorty Society.

So he does, I think, have a kind of rich philosophical perspective that is so concerned with speaking to the problems that confront us, you know, as global citizens, as U.S. citizens, that there's been a lot more work in a constructive, positive way since he died than there ever was before.

Yeah, that sounds very good. And what are you working on right now? Are you working on something Rorty related or are you in different political philosophical spheres? Well, the Rorty side of things is always calling me and I do have some projects there. Part one of which is about

developing this conception of philosophy in its normative role because he was so worried about capital P philosophy. He didn't say a lot about this pragmatist engaged type of philosophy. So bringing that out a bit more, um,

There's a, I think, 50th anniversary volume in the works on philosophy in the mirror of nature coming out in a few years that I'm going to contribute to. But outside of Rorty, I do work on ethics and

justice, injustice, even on race and whiteness. So I'm doing some things in those areas that are inspired by a lot of Rorty's, you know, philosophical moves, but pushing, you know, pragmatist ideas into places that Rorty himself never took them.

Okay, Chris, thank you very much. Last question. You talked about going through the archives and the boxes and maybe discovering texts from obscure places. What is your favorite essay in this volume? Or was there a discovery you made that was like stood out to you? Yeah, well, I think the first essay, Who Are We?,

I like a lot because I think it really captures in the most explicit way his focus on, you know, figuring out who we are and our relations to others and then forming the kind of moral communities, you know, forming the kind of we that will create a circle of moral concern. To me, that's really, I think, the cornerstone of his thought. And I've always liked that essay. It's not...

It's not a well-known essay, so it was great to feature that. But the one that I think was most surprising that we found is unpublished previously is American Universities and the Hope for Social Justice, where, I mean, one topic we didn't get a chance to talk about today is, you know, his views about education and the threats to humanistic learning and the ways in which

you know, the academics and university college students can return to this role that he saw them playing, you know, in the 1960s about, you know, being a kind of moral conscience, what it would take to bring that back. And I think he has both some interesting philosophical ideas about education there, but also focuses on concrete

You know, so he does live up to his own philosophical claims where he has a great passage I didn't know much about or knew that he even was interested in on a movement called Justice for Janitors that was happening around the time he wrote that essay.

where it was about, you know, trying to equalize some of the pay inequities, even within universities, the academic staff versus, you know, the non-academic. So it has a great mix of the theoretical and the practical. So finding that essay really was, I thought, a great moment and

very pleased to get it out there so others can read it. Chris, thank you very much for taking your time and sharing your insights. Thank you very much. Thank you, Kai. I really enjoyed it.