Evidently, Richard Rorty is one of the most famous and significant contemporary philosophers…yet, why is he the professor of comparitive literature at Stanford? What role does fiction and allegory have to play in the role of philosophy?
I am paraphrasing from one of my professors (incidentally, a Classics professor, not philosophy), but in the past, religion has yielded to philosophy (in terms of pagans and ancient Greek philosophy). Is philosophy now yielding to literature?
nope. philosophy is deconstructing literature
-Imp
I, for one, enjoy philosophical literature. The more varied forms of philosophy the better! If we were reduced to only ever reading from the analytic tradition we would be much worse off.
The difference between philosophy and literature is purely institutional. As I’ve said several times before, a student of philosophy or literature is and should be a student of the other.
Ultimately, it’s all just arranging words…
Read Heidegger’s “Poetry, Language, Thought” and you will understand why poetic language and style reveals the truth in a way that arumentative and ‘philosophical’ language could never dream of. Its for a similar reaosn that Sartre and Beauvoir priveled their fiction to their non-fiction in terms of conveying the mst profound aspects of their philosophy.
Rorty is a comparative literature professor because philosophy is over. Nevertheless thought still has a future, as Derrida said. The clumsy, farcical and boring analytic obsession in north america has rendered philosophy departments lifleless, uncreative, and ineffectual. Thats why no body gives a crap about ‘philosophy’ nowadays, which is not to say that nobody cares about thought. This is evident when asking one simple question: who the hell else cares about analytic philosophy except analytic philosophers? The influece of contintental philosphers, all of whom have engaged with literature in their style of writing if not in what they write about, and this has allowed them to become so influential outside philosophy departments; in the Art communities, in Art history, in comparative literature, in critical theory, in history, in sociology, in political science, and the list never ends. THeir thought is so much more rich, so much more frutiful then the dry and dumb anlytic philosophy, and so they have the attention of everyone in the world of thought and creativity. That is perhaps why Rorty has abandoned philosphhy for comparative literature.
Owen
So it isn’t…the same thing? Isn’t literature still taking precedence over “philosophical” speculation in the traditional sense of Kant or Locke or Aristotle?
. I agree.
Thanks, and I think I agree with you. I think that’s what I was trying to say…it’s something that makes existentialism interesting to me (like Barret’s irrational man). I have friends who like existentialism…because it matches their belief systems…but refuse to discuss any real philosophy with me. They haven’t even read Sartre or Kierkegaard or Nietzsche, but they tell me how much existentialism rocks.
I naively tried to talk real philosophy with them when they challenged my beliefs…I’ve lost a few friends that way. But you’re right, there are hardly any “philosophers” any more…both because of the postmodern condition and because philosophy has become largely impersonal. I’m not even going to take philosophy at my university because of that…I’d rather just read the books myself and sort it out individually.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction
there is a slight differance… a ha a ha a ha… i am sad inside
-Szpak