Over at Inside Higher Ed, Scott McLemee interviews Neil Gross, author of Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher:
Q: A common account of Rorty’s career has him starting out as an analytic philosopher who then undertakes a kind of “turn to pragmatism” in the 1970s, thereby reviving interest in a whole current of American philosophy that had become a preserve of specialists. Your telling is different. What is the biggest misconception embedded in that more familiar thumbnail version?
A: Rorty didn’t start out as an analytic philosopher. His masters thesis at Chicago was on Whitehead’s metaphysics, and while his dissertation at Yale on potentiality was appreciative in part of analytic contributions, one of its major aims was to show how much value there might be in dialogue between analytic and non-analytic approaches. As Bruce Kuklick has shown, dialogue between various philosophical traditions, and pluralism, were watchwords of the Yale department, and Rorty was quite taken with these metaphilosophical ideals.
Rorty only became seriously committed to the analytic enterprise after graduate school while teaching at Wellesley, his first job. This conversion was directly related to his interest in moving up in the academic hierarchy to an assistant professorship in a top ranked graduate program. At nearly all such programs at the time, analytic philosophy had come to rule the roost. This was very much the case at Princeton, which hired him away from Wellesley, and his commitment to analytic philosophy solidified even more during the years when he sought tenure there.
But the conventional account is flawed in another way as well.