Back in the Sixties, before he became the bad boy of American philosophy, Richard Rorty struck his colleagues as a safe and promising young man. His first book, published in 1967, was an anthology of Essays in Philosophical Method designed to document the reorientations in analytic philosophy that followed Rudolf Carnap's move from Germany to the US in 1935. Carnap had promoted the cause of 'scientific philosophy' for a quarter of a century, first in Chicago, then in Los Angeles, persuading dozens of America's best and brightest to join his campaign of radical conceptual cleansing. The new philosophers were going to flush out the mushy metaphysics of the past and replace it with tough-minded research into the 'linguistic frameworks' through which we conceptualise the world. Thanks to Carnap, philosophy was going to be reborn as the systematic study of language.

LRB 15 October 1998 | PDF Download