Going through Richard Rorty’s emails

I was looking at Greg Mankiw’s blog a few minutes ago when I saw the link to the New York Times article and read the news. Well known philosopher Richard Rorty has died.

 

This man taught at UVA when I was there. I remember during my fourth year I took an intro to political theory class (GFPT 101) and the teaching assistant jokingly said that just as his generation of students spent a lot of time reading the papers of the likes of Plato, future generations would be going through Rorty’s emails to attempt to understand this intellectual giant. I never did take a class with Rorty. The closest I came to sitting in his class was during my last semester when I was in the audience of an event at Newcomb Hall in which he and the government department’s James W. Ceaser discussed Caesar’s recent book in which Caesar disagreed vehemently with Rorty. I found Rorty interesting enough to attend the event but not interesting enough to stay for its entirety. A few years later I was talking to someone who graduated ahead of me and he told me him and his sister (who also knows me from UVA) were watching the event on C-SPAN when all of a sudden I walked through the camera’s field of vision and one entire side of my face filled the television screen for a few seconds.

 

During my first semester at Kenan-Flagler, the most popular professor at UVA came to speak at FOCUS and told a fascinating story about an email exchange between him and Rorty. He had emailed Rorty to congratulate him on his appointment at Stanford and the reply that came back read (paraphrasing) “we should do lunch before I leave, it will be a meeting of the minds between the man who’s done the most to convince UVA students that there is no god and the man who’s done the most to convince them that there is.” I don’t know whether he got around to changing his mind about the existence of God before he died. But if he had remained an atheist until his dying day, I am pretty sure he doesn’t feel the same way right now.