Talk about cynical marketing! Columbia University Press has put out a slender book that represents itself as authored by Richard Rorty. The title suggests a topic of importance—Ethics for Today: Finding Common Ground Between Philosophy and Religion. But when you open the book (hopefully before you buy it), you discover that only ten pages—yes, ten pages!—were written by Rorty.
And the ten pages aren’t all that impressive, printing as they do a rather slight lecture Rorty gave in Torino, Italy, an occasion at which he reiterated his usual false dichotomies between an essentialist view that imagines itself capable of proving the truth of everything (Descartes on steroids) and his own view that trying to prove anything is foolish and futile (Sextus Empiricus with a megaphone). I tired of this rhetorical strategy decades ago.
In any event, didn’t John Henry Newman’s Grammar of Assent put to rest the false inference from the fact that nothing of metaphysical consequence can be definitively proven to the conclusion that therefore metaphysical arguments have no cognitive influence? It’s always seemed obvious to me that we can persuade people about a great deal more than we can compel them to accept by way of syllogisms. This Rorty ignored, in part, I think, because he was inclined to shut down conversations with those who held metaphysical views different from his own. If your look back at his books, I think you’ll consistently find that he denounces a great deal of the Western philosophical tradition as “foundationalist.” I think Rorty was a supple reader of literature, and a creative secular moralist, but on this score I have found him tedious.
However this is not the place to engage Richard Rorty, for Ethics for Today is not a book by Richard Rorty. Instead, it’s a grotesquely transparent attempt by Columbia University Press to cash in on Rorty’s name and reputation. Shame on them.
December 22nd, 2010 | 3:42 pm
Who wrote the rest? I think if I had written this book, I’d be more than a bit ticked off at having it appear under someone else’s name, even if the name guarantees bigger sales.
December 22nd, 2010 | 8:00 pm
Did the same publisher do something similar with a title they present as a new book by David Foster Wallace? The core of the book is his undergraduate thesis, a dense philosophy paper. It’s about 75 pages set toward the end of the volume. The rest of the 252 pages are mostly essays on Wallace’s thesis.
It’s clearly a Wallace-centric book. You could argue that it’s fairer to Wallace to make him the posthumous author instead of whoever functioned as the volume editor, gathering and coordinating the contributions from various academicians. My guess is that, whether or not fairness to Wallace was ever a consideration for the publisher, the marketing value of his name was.
With the Rorty book, the publisher just applied similar reasoning but with less justification, given that his essay is shorter than short.
Book length has always been an issue for publishers. University presses seem increasingly reluctant to publish long books. You still see the occasional 200,000-word volume but the trend is away from that. The preferred length is usually in the range of 80 to 120K, which gives you a book big enough to make you feel like you’re getting your money’s worth but not so big that the cost of editing, composition, and printing drives up the list price so high that no one will buy it.
As for the Rorty title, a journal-length essay published as a book by a university press, it’s the other side of the trend away from long and toward short. You can publish the 15K-word essay as a sort of chapbook but usually only if the author is famous, and then you’re likely to add on enough pages in the way of preface, foreword, introduction, conclusion, and so on to make the book look less like a pamphlet.
Electronic publishing eliminates a lot of the practical reasons book publishers had for vexing about page count. As an e-book or web publication, the long piece is still more expensive to run than the short piece but not to the degree that it is when it’s in print. And the piece that’s too short to justify a printed book can be published online and also be made available to be downloaded to a mobile device. Given this development, the rationale for book publishers not to publish the stand-alone essay as well as the full-length feature film, as it were, begins to fade.
The Rorty book is an example of how university presses, whether they realize it or not, may be adapting to the new publishing environment. They’re taking steps away from their identity as traditional book publishers and toward a new identity as providers of scholarly content.
It may take a few more years for the presses and their readers to fully appreciate how new media, even if only as a more efficient delivery system, can serve the mission of scholarly publishing. It may take a few more years for publishers to figure out when it does and when it doesn’t make sense to send a title to print.
What the publisher in question here has done with the Rorty and Wallace titles is probably driven by marketing. For all we know their claiming these two famous guys as their authors may actually boost sales, although the down side is that when readers figure out what’s going they’re liable to feel cheated.
University presses are increasingly pinched by cutbacks in library budgets and in many cases by reduction or withdrawal of funding from their parent institutions. Many of them have started publishing trade-like coffee-table books and the like to try to subsidize the monographs that it’s their mission to make available to the handful of people they were written for. A lot of the people who work in scholarly publishing don’t feel great about having to do this. It’s against that background that, when they do something like market Richard Rorty’s ten pages as a new book of his, they put aside what’s left of their youthful aspiration to be gentleman- and gentlewoman scholars and resign themselves to the idea that if they’re going to continue to work in the business they’re going to have to be willing to get their hands a little dirty. I wouldn’t condone /what/ they did, but knowing the environment they work in I would not be very quick to condemn /them/.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact