Customer Reviews

Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies: A Conversation with Richard Rorty

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This book is valuable if you are a Rorty fan and have followed his career. It is the best insight into his personality. Namely, his peeves and dislikes. For example although he is a staunch liberal, he strongly dislikes hand wringing extremists and nihilists. He really is a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps pragmatist. And if you push him too hard he pulls the gloves off. He is also a realist in the Aristotilean sense of he knows he is a well paid humanities professor living in an ivory tower (brownstone actually - Stanford) and that most of many of his (analytic) peers don't care for him. What I really like about Rorty, and this comes out clearly in this little book, is his attitude that the playing field has been leveled since Wittgenstein, Derrida, et.al. 'So hey, why not make the world a little better place than you found it?' (Kind of like what your Mom used to tell you.) What I don't like is his "blind eye" towards religion (as a friend who got his Ph.D. from him at Princeton once described him). But that's just the way it goes sometimes for some people. If you have read a lot of Rorty, get this book. If you haven't, then start where you are supposed to: Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.

I am neither a humanities professor nor a cultural leftist per se, but I thoroughly enjoyed this pamphlet and feel slightly smarter having read it. The overall feeling is similar to having a few glasses of wine with an aged professor who indulges in a little cattiness and sectarian in jokes. Made me feel a little guilty about being an adjunct -- and inspired me to rent the documentary "Arguing the World." One to ponder.

If you don't know who Richard Rorty is or what "Oligarchies" means, you will after reading this. "Six bucks". How can you go wrong?

Two earnest grad students take on a cantankerous professor during a 4-hour interview! The results are explosive!