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"Time Will Tell, But Epistemology Won't: In Memory of Richard Rorty" A Symposium to Celebrate Richard Rorty's Archive

Rorty as a Public Intellectual bannerUC Irvine

Rorty as a Public Intellectual

On May 14, 2010, UC Irvine hosted a symposium to celebrate the opening of the Richard Rorty Papers in the UC Irvine Libraries Critical Theory Archive for research. Rorty was a pragmatist philosopher, critical theorist, and public intellectual who is commonly described as one of the most important thinkers of his era. In addition to almost 25 linear feet of papers, the Richard Rorty Archive also include over 1,000 born-digital word processing files that were preserved from Rorty's floppy disks in UCIspace @ the Libraries.

Participants in the Time Will Tell, But Epistemology Won't symposium addressed a number of key questions for criticism in the era of computational media. What is an archive if it includes “born digital” materials? How do new forms of digital production and reception change the character of scholarly discourse? What is the relationship between public memory and computer memory? How should teaching materials be handled in the age of open courseware? How can Rorty’s ideas about philosophy as cultural politics be read in both the liberal and the academic blogospheres? How can more dialogue between critical theory and the digital humanities be fostered?

The symposium was sponsored by the UC Irvine Libraries, the UC Irvine Humanities Center, the UC Irvine Critical Theory Emphasis, the UC Irvine Department of Philosophy, the UC Irvine Department of Comparative Literature, the Office of the Campus Writing Coordinator, and the systemwide University of California Humanities Research Institute.

Speakers included Elizabeth Losh (UC Irvine), David Theo Goldberg (UC Irvine), Mary Rorty, (Stanford), Michelle Light (UC Irvine), Dawn Schmitz (UC Irvine), Erin Obodiac (UC Irvine), Tom Hyry (UCLA), Christine Borgman (UCLA), Iain Thomson (University of New Mexico), Mark Wrathall (UC Riverside), Margaret Gilbert (UC Irvine), Ian Bogost (Georgia Tech), Steven Mailloux (Loyola Marymount), Ali M. Meghdadi (UC Irvine), Brian Garcia (UC Irvine), Tae-Kyung Timothy Elijah Sung (UC Irvine), and Michael Bérubé (Pennsylvania State).

Cover page of For What Has Already Been Given: Religion and the Rorty Papers

For What Has Already Been Given: Religion and the Rorty Papers

(2010)

One of Rorty's last publications is an afterword he contributed to an updated edition of the 1907 classic _Christianity and the Social Crisis_ written ny the Social Gospel giant, Walter Rauschenbusch, who was Rorty's maternal grandfather. In this reflection on my experience organizing the archive, I attempt to situate Rorty's atheism between the religious pragmatism of his students Cornel West and Jeffrey Stout, and the anti-liberal New Traditionalism of John Milbank and Stanley Hauerwas.

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