Marianne Janack, the John Stewart Kennedy Professor of Philosophy, recently published "Richard Rorty, Rocks, and Realism" in The Ethics, Epistemology, and Politics of Richard Rorty.
In the piece Janack asks, if Richard Rorty was so ambivalent about his identity as a philosopher and so dismissive of debates about realism, why was he so critical of the physicist Alak Sokal's attempt to compare the laws of physics to rocks?
Janack looks at the ways in which rocks are used in discussions of realism, idealism, and skepticism, and the ways in which the comparisons draw the assumption that rocks are atheoretical stand-ins for metaphysical theories.
