Recently, the Richard Rorty Society hosted the second international conference at Penn State University, with the title “Rorty’s Ethics.” The conference took place November 22-24th, 2019 at the Nittany Lion Inn, in State College. For this second international conference, Prof. Robert Brandom was the keynote speaker. The responses to his two plenaries were delivered by Richard Bernstein and Brady Bowman. The full program and details can be found at the Society’s Website. Below, I talk with Eduardo Mendieta about the conference.
Tell me about the history of the Richard Rorty Society and this conference.
Richard Rorty is without question the most important U.S. philosopher of the last half a century. When he died in 2007, we lost not only one of the most ecumenical, eloquent, and cosmopolitan philosophers to come out of the U.S.; we also lost one of the most versatile, provocative, and to many, annoying, philosophers, who also in paradoxical ways thought philosophy had become too academized and needed to return to the agora, the public sphere, and make itself relevant, again. Being annoying, however, is a philosophic virtue—as we know from Socrates’s self-description as a gadfly. In 2014, I hosted an international conference at Stony Brook University on Long Island, entitled “Philosophy as a Transitional Genre: On Richard Rorty’s Intellectual Bequest.” One of the goals of the conference was to gather philosophers working on Rorty’s legacy and see if we could establish a society that would periodically host conferences on his work, but also to become an international society that could nurture and sponsor study of his work. Thus, the Richard Rorty Society was born. The inaugural conference took place at Hamilton College, during September 8-10, 2016, which was hosted and organized by Marianne Janack. Prof. Cornel West was the keynote speaker at this conference, and he and Richard Bernstein talked together after West’s talk about Rorty and his legacy.
What was the purpose of this conference?
The purpose of this conference was to provide a platform to present, discuss, and engage the latest work inspired by, based on, or developing new insights from the work of Rorty. The conference’s theme, “Rorty’s Ethics,” however, is meant to provide a lens through which to see the relevance of Rorty’s work, as it touches on ethics, on contemporary problems. The background assumption of selecting this theme is that Rorty’s work was motivated by deep ethical commitments and that, while Rorty’s work does not espouse a specific ethical stance, it does develop some important ethical arguments that remain vital and guiding in our times. The submissions and papers delivered were focused on ethics, political philosophy, the philosophy of education, but we also had papers on epistemology, philosophy of science, irony, and of course, the debates about Rorty’s relationship to the wide canon of pragmatism, analytic and continental philosophy. One third of the participants came from outside the U.S. Philosophers came from Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Europe, Australia, the Netherlands.
What types of research were showcased at the conference? What value do you think this research will have for the modern world?
A lot of the presentations discussed Rorty’s “pragmatic ethics,” i.e. his belief that ethics has to do with creativity, loyalty, respect, solidarity, generosity, or what he called a “democratic ethos.” Ethics, for Rorty, had to do with how a society enables “ethical” character, and what practices and institutions best afford us the ability to nurture such character. Climate change, racial and gender injustice, economic inequality, the role of truth and truthfulness in democratic society, to name some of the key themes Rorty was interested in, we hope will also be addressed in many of the papers to be presented at the conference.
How does the work of the Richard Rorty Society, or the work that was presented at the conference, overlap with other areas of philosophical research?
The “Rorty’s Ethics” conference was hosted primarily by the Rock Ethics Institute and the Department of Philosophy at Penn State. The former funded it through its endowment, the Harold K. Schilling Lecture on Science, Technology, and Society. The conference’s theme is exemplary of the goals of the Rock Ethics Institute, which promotes interdisciplinary ethics research. The Penn State Department has been long promoting the study of “American” philosophy in a new and more expansive key, and Rorty was a poster child for the kind of ecumenism and cosmopolitanism that is seriously attentive to gender and race, as Rorty was. But, we also have sponsorships from departments, institutes and centers that eagerly and swiftly wanted to support the conference because of Rorty’s impact in their respective fields: the History Department, the Department of Communications, Arts, and Sciences, and the McCourtney Institute for Democracy and the Center for Democratic Deliberation. In fact, the McCourtney Institute hosts a podcast on its website and they have scheduled to tape one with Chris Voparil. The podcast will focus on Rorty’s more than ever relevant book Achieving our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (1998). You can find the podcast here.
Your conference has the theme of ”Rorty’s Ethics.” Why did you choose that theme, and what types of submissions did you receive?
Tom Howell, of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), was at the conference to interview many of the participants and the officers of the Richard Rorty Society. He produced, and already posted, his wonderfully informative podcast. You can find it here.
Still, when is ethics not an urgent theme? However, we, the officers of the RRS, decided that given the resurgence of ethno-nationalism, the striking revitalization of white supremacy, and the effusiveness of vitriolic and virulent hate speech that is undermining, corroding, and washing away the democratic ethos of civility, respect, solidarity, and loyalty—key words in Rorty’s lexicon—we felt that we needed to see how Rorty’s work speaks to our needs in these times of democratic urgency. The subject of ethics also figures prominently in a forthcoming volume of Rorty’s unpublished essays, On Philosophy and Philosophers: Unpublished Papers, 1960-2000, edited by W.P. Małecki and Chris Voparil (Cambridge University Press, 2020), including the lead essay, “Philosophy as Ethics.”
Who were your keynote speakers? What about their work made you think they would be good choices?
Robert Brandom is now without question our most well-known and important, creative and original, philosopher working in the pragmatist tradition. He has written extensively on Rorty, among many other philosophers. He delivered two keynote addresses, linking Rorty’s work to Hegel’s, thus, tracing an incredible arc between the German and American philosophical traditions. In these lectures, Brandom showed why we ought to think of Rorty’s philosophy as belonging to the Tales of the Mighty Dead, to riff on the title of one of Brandom’s most read works.
What was the conference like?
We had nearly 70 attendees. Most were philosophers, but we also had people from English, Political Theory, and Cultural Studies who came to Penn State from at least 16 different countries. The quality of the papers was really outstanding. Thus, we are exploring the possibility of selecting some of the papers and collecting them in either a special issue of a journal or even an edited volume.
Was there anything unique about your conference that you’d like to highlight?
We were particularly delighted that Tom Howell, producer of CBC Radio One’s documentary show Ideas – an “oasis for people who like to think” – attended our conference as part of a documentary about Rorty. The episode Tom Howell produced about our conference (mentioned above) can be found here.
In addition, we tapped about 90 minutes of a conversation among Chris Voparil, Marianne Janack, and Richard Bernstein, with Eduardo Mendieta asking questions focused on the relationship between Rorty’s work and contemporary thinking about ethics. We hope to be posting soon the conversation as a blog on the website of Rock Ethics Institute.
Where can people go if they want to get involved in the RRS or future conferences?
Our website is continuously being updated. So, check it out for CFP and latest blogs, books, etc, on Rorty’s work.
Who can people contact if they have questions?
They may contact Eduardo Mendieta at ezm5325@psu.edu, James E. Updike at jeu2@psu.edu or Susan Dieleman at sdielem@siue.edu
The purpose of The Forefront of Research is to draw attention to the work done at conferences by interviewing conference organizers, presenters, and keynotes about upcoming or recently finished conferences. We want to highlight new ideas, interpretations, and projects that can shape the field and about which it is important for researchers to know. Please contact us if you have ideas for this series.
