Richard Rorty

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Western Philosophy 20th-century philosophy
Name	Richard McKay Rorty
Birth	October 4, 1931 New York City, New York
Death	June 8, 2007
School/tradition	Postanalytic · Pragmatism
Main interests	Philosophy of language Philosophy of mind Ethics · Liberalism Meta-epistemology
Notable ideas	Postphilosophy · Ironism Final vocabulary Epistemological behaviorism
Influenced by	John Dewey · Martin Heidegger Ludwig Wittgenstein · Wilfrid Sellars Friedrich Nietzsche · W.V.O. Quine Donald Davidson · William James John Rawls · Marcel Proust Vladimir Nabokov
Influenced	Robert Brandom · John McDowell Gianni Vattimo · Cornel West Nancy Fraser · Sam Harris

Richard McKay Rorty (October 4, 1931 - June 8, 2007) was an American philosopher. He had a long and diverse career in Philosophy, Humanities, and Literature departments. His complex intellectual background gave him a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the analytical tradition in philosophy he would later famously reject.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Major works 2.1 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature 2.2 Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity 2.3 Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth 2.4 Essays on Heidegger and Others 2.5 Achieving Our Country 2.6 Rorty and His Critics 3 Reception and criticism 4 Select bibliography 5 Further Reading 6 See also 7 External links 8 Notes

[edit] Biography

Richard Rorty was born October 4, 1931 in New York City to James and Winifred Rorty. Winifred was the daughter of Social Gospel theologian Walter Rauschenbusch. Rorty enrolled at the University of Chicago shortly before turning 15, where he received a bachelor's and a master's degree in philosophy, continuing at Yale University for a PhD in philosophy^[1]. He served two years in the army, and then taught at Wellesley College for three years, till 1961.^[2]

Thereafter for 21 years at Princeton University Rorty was a professor of philosophy.^[3] In 1982 he became Kenan Professor of the Humanities at the University Of Virginia.^[4] In 1998 Rorty became professor emeritus of comparative literature (and philosophy, by courtesy), at Stanford University.^[4] During this period he was especially popular, and once quipped that he had been assigned to the position of "transitory professor of trendy studies".^[5]

Rorty's doctoral dissertation, "The Concept of Potentiality", and his first book (as editor), The Linguistic Turn (1967), were firmly in the prevailing analytic mode. However, he gradually became acquainted with the American philosophical movement known as pragmatism, particularly the writings of John Dewey. The noteworthy work being done by analytic philosophers such as W.V.O. Quine and Wilfrid Sellars caused significant shifts in his thinking, which were reflected in his next book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979).

Pragmatists generally hold that a proposition is useful if employing it helps us understand or solve a given problem. Rorty combined pragmatism about truth and other matters with a later Wittgensteinian philosophy of language which declares that meaning is a social-linguistic product, and sentences do not 'link up' with the world in a correspondence relation. This intellectual framework allowed him to question many of philosophy's most basic assumptions.

In the late 1980s through the 1990s, Rorty focused on the continental philosophical tradition, examining the work of Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. His work from this period included Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers (1991) and Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers (1998). The latter two works attempt to bridge the dichotomy between analytic and continental philosophy by claiming that the two traditions complement rather than oppose each other.

According to Rorty, analytic philosophy may not have lived up to its pretensions and may not have solved the puzzles it thought it had. Yet such philosophy, in the process of finding reasons for putting those pretensions and puzzles aside, helped earn itself an important place in the history of ideas. By giving up on the quest for apodicticity and finality that Husserl shared with Carnap and Russell, and by finding new reasons for thinking that such quest will never succeed, analytic philosophy cleared a path that leads past scientism, just as the German idealists cleared a path that led around empiricism.

In the last fifteen years of his life, Rorty continued to publish voluminously, including four volumes of philosophical papers, Achieving Our Country (1998), a political manifesto partly based on readings of John Dewey and Walt Whitman in which he defended the idea of a progressive, pragmatic left against what he feels are defeatist positions espoused by the so-called critical left personified by figures like Michel Foucault, and Philosophy and Social Hope, a collection of essays for a general audience. His last works focused on the place of religion in contemporary life and philosophy as "cultural politics".

On June 8, 2007, Rorty died in his home of pancreatic cancer. ^[1][4][6]

Shortly before his death, he wrote a piece called "The Fire of Life", (published in the November 2007 issue of Poetry Magazine)^[7], in which he meditates on his diagnosis and the comfort of poetry. He concludes, "I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends."

[edit] Major works

[edit] Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

Main article: Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Rorty argues that the central problems of modern epistemology depend upon a picture of the mind as trying to faithfully represent (or "mirror") a mind-independent external reality. If we give up this metaphor, then the entire enterprise of foundationalist epistemology is misguided. A foundationalist believes that in order to avoid the regress inherent in claiming that all beliefs are justified by other beliefs, some beliefs must be self-justifying and form the foundations to all knowledge. There were two senses of "foundationalism" criticized in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. In the philosophical sense, Rorty criticized the attempt to justify knowledge claims by tracing them to a set of foundations; more broadly, he criticized the claim of philosophy to function foundationally within a culture. The former argument draws on Sellars's critique of the idea that there is a "given" in sensory perception, in combination with Quine's critique of the distinction between analytic sentences (sentences which are true solely in virtue of what they mean) and synthetic sentences (sentences made true by the world). Each critique, taken alone, provides a problem for a conception of how philosophy ought to proceed. Combined, Rorty claimed, the two critiques are devastating. With no privileged insight into the structure of belief and no privileged realm of truths of meaning, we have, instead, knowledge as those beliefs that pay their way. The only worthwhile description of the actual process of inquiry, Rorty claimed, was a Kuhnian account of the standard phases of the progress of discipline, oscillating through normal and abnormal science, between routine problem solving and intellectual crises. The only role left for a philosopher is to act as an intellectual gadfly, attempting to induce a revolutionary break with previous practice, a role that Rorty was happy to take on himself. Rorty claims that each generation tries to subject all disciplines to the model that the most successful discipline of the day employs. On Rorty's view, the success of modern science has led academics in philosophy and the humanities to mistakenly imitate scientific methods. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature popularized and extended ideas of Wilfrid Sellars (the critique of the Myth of the given) and W. V. O. Quine (the critique of the analytic-synthetic distinction) and others who advocate the doctrine of "dissolving" rather than solving philosophical problems.

[edit] Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

Main article: Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), Rorty abandons the attempt to explain his theories in analytic terms and creates an alternative conceptual schema to that of the "Platonists" he rejects. This schema is based on the belief that there is no intelligible truth (at least not in the sense in which it is conventionally conceptualized). Rorty proposes that philosophy (along with art, science, etc.) can and should be used to provide one with the ability to (re)create oneself, a view adapted from Nietzsche and which Rorty also identifies with the novels of Proust, Nabokov, and Henry James. This book also marks his first attempt to specifically articulate a political vision consistent with his philosophy, the vision of a diverse community bound together by opposition to cruelty, and not by abstract ideas such as 'justice' or 'common humanity' policed by the separation of the public and private realms of life.

In this book, Rorty first introduces the terminology of Ironism, which he uses to describe his mindset and his philosophy.

[edit] Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth

Amongst the essays in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1 (1990), is "The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy," in which Rorty defends Rawls against communitarian critics and argues that personal ideals of perfection and standards of truth were no more needed in politics than a state religion. He sees Rawls' concept of reflective equilibrium as a more appropriate way of approaching political decision-making in modern liberal democracies.

[edit] Essays on Heidegger and Others

In this text, Rorty focuses primarily on the continental philosophers Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. He argues that these European "post-Nietzscheans" share much in common with American pragmatists, in that they critique metaphysics and reject the correspondence theory of truth. When discussing Derrida, Rorty claims that Derrida is most useful when viewed as a funny writer who attempted to circumvent the Western philosophical tradition, rather than the inventor of a philosophical "method." In this vein, Rorty criticizes Derrida's followers like Paul de Man for taking deconstructive literary theory too seriously.

[edit] Achieving Our Country

Main article: Achieving Our Country

In Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (1998), Rorty differentiates between what he sees as the two sides of the Left, a critical Left and a progressive Left. He criticizes the critical Left, which is exemplified by post-structuralists such as Michel Foucault and postmodernists such as Jean-François Lyotard. Although these intellectuals make insightful claims about the ills of society, Rorty holds that they provide no alternatives and even present progress as problematic at times. On the other hand, the progressive Left, exemplified for Rorty by John Dewey, makes progress its priority in its goal of "achieving our country." Rorty sees the progressive Left as acting in the philosophical spirit of pragmatism.

[edit] Rorty and His Critics

On fundamentalist religion, Rorty has this to say:

“It seems to me that the regulative idea that we heirs of the Enlightenment, we Socratists, most frequently use to criticize the conduct of various conversational partners is that of ‘needing education in order to outgrow their primitive fear, hatreds, and superstitions’ . . . It is a concept which I, like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own . . . The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire ‘American liberal establishment’ is engaged in a conspiracy. The parents have a point. Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten teachers talking with their students . . . When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank. . . You have to be educated in order to be . . . a participant in our conversation . . . So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours . . . I don’t see anything herrschaftsfrei [domination free] about my handling of my fundamentalist students. Rather, I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft [domination] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents . . . I am just as provincial and contextualist as the Nazi teachers who made their students read Der Stürmer; the only difference is that I serve a better cause.”

-‘Universality and Truth,’ in Robert B. Brandom (ed.), Rorty and his Critics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 21-2.

[edit] Reception and criticism

While controversial, Rorty is one of the most widely discussed philosophers in our time ^[8], and his works have provoked thoughtful responses from some of the most well-respected philosophers of his age. In Brandom's anthology, entitled Rorty and His Critics, for example, Rorty's philosophy is discussed by Donald Davidson, Jürgen Habermas, Hilary Putnam, John McDowell, Jacques Bouveresse, and Daniel Dennett, among others.^[9]

John McDowell is strongly influenced by Rorty, in particular Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). In the preface to Mind and World (pp. ix-x) McDowell states that "it will be obvious that Rorty's work is [...] central for the way I define my stance here".

Although Rorty is a hardened liberal, his political and moral philosophies have been attacked from the Left, some of whom believe them to be insufficient frameworks for social justice^[10]. Rorty was also criticized by others for his rejection of the idea that science can depict the world.^[11] In Daniel Dennett's humorous Philosophical Lexicon, 'Rorty' is defined as 'incorrigible'^[12], which sums up both Rorty's career and much of the philosophic community's reaction to it.

One major criticism, especially of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is that Rorty's philosophical 'hero', the ironist, is an elitist figure ^[13]. Rorty claims that the majority of people would be "commensensically nominalist and historicist" but not ironist.

Rorty often draws on a broad range of other philosophers to support his views, and his interpretation of their works has been contested ^[14]. Since Rorty is working from a tradition of re-interpretation, he remains uninterested in 'accurately' portraying other thinkers, but rather in utilizing their work in the same way a literary critic might use a novel. His essay "The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres" is a thorough description of how he treats the greats in the history of philosophy.

As detailed in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, many philosophical criticisms against Rorty are made using axioms that are explicitly rejected within Rorty's own philosophy.^[15] For instance, Rorty defines allegations of irrationality as affirmations of vernacular "otherness", and so accusations of irrationality are not only brushed aside, but are expected during any argument^[16].

[edit] Select bibliography

• Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. ISBN
• Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. ISBN
• Philosophy in History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. (co-editor)
• Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ISBN
• Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ISBN
• Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ISBN
• Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. ISBN
• Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ISBN
• Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin, 2000. ISBN
• Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies: A Conversation with Richard Rorty. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2002. ISBN
• The Future of Religion with Gianni Vattimo; edited by Santiago Zabala. Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2005. ISBN
• Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers IV. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

[edit] Further Reading

Books:

• Richard Rorty: politics and vision / Christopher Voparil., 2006
• Heidegger, Rorty, and the Eastern thinkers : a hermeneutics of cross-cultural understanding / Wei Zhang., 2006
• Richard Rorty: his philosophy under discussion / Andreas Vieth., 2005
• The concept of Rortyan Christian ironism / Odom, Barton Page., 2005
• Richard Rorty / Charles B Guignon., 2003
• Between Rorty and MacIntyre: A Kierkegaardian account of irony and moral commitment / Frazier, Bradley., 2003
• Richard Rorty's American faith / Taub, Gad Shmuel., 2003
• The ethical ironist: Kierkegaard, Rorty, and the educational quest / Rohrer, Patricia Jean., 2003
• Doing philosophy as a way to individuation: Reading Rorty and Cavell / Kwak, Duck-Joo., 2003
• Richard Rorty / Alan R Malachowski., 2002
• Richard Rorty: critical dialogues / Matthew Festenstein., 2001
• Richard Rorty: education, philosophy, and politics / Michael Peters., 2001
• Religion and the Demise of Liberal Rationalism / Judd Owen., 2001
• Rorty and his critics / Robert Brandom., 2000
• On Rorty / Richard Rumana., 2000
• Philosophy and freedom : Derrida, Rorty, Habermas, Foucault / John McCumber., 2000
• A pragmatist's progress?: Richard Rorty and American intellectual history / John Pettegrew., 2000
• Problems of the modern self: Reflections on Rorty, Taylor, Nietzsche, and Foucault / Dudrick, David Francis., 2000
• The last conceptual revolution: a critique of Richard Rorty's political philosophy / Eric Gander., 1999
• Cultural otherness : correspondence with Richard Rorty / Anindita Niyogi Balslev., 1999
• The work of friendship : Rorty, his critics, and the project of solidarity / Dianne Rothleder., 1999
• Pragmatism and political theory : from Dewey to Rorty / Matthew Festenstein., 1997
• Debating the state of philosophy: Habermas, Rorty, and Kolakowski / Józef Niznik., 1996
• For the love of perfection : Richard Rorty and liberal education / René Vincente Arcilla., 1995
• Rorty & pragmatism: the philosopher responds to his critics / Herman J Saatkamp., 1995
• Richard Rorty : prophet and poet of the new pragmatism / David L Hall., 1994
• Without God or his doubles : realism, relativism, and Rorty / D Vaden House., 1994
• Beyond postmodern politics : Lyotard, Rorty, Foucault / Honi Fern Haber., 1994
• After the demise of the tradition : Rorty, critical theory, and the fate of philosophy/ Kai Nielsen., 1991
• Reading Rorty: critical responses to Philosophy and the mirror of nature (and beyond) / Alan R Malachowski., 1990
• Rorty's humanistic pragmatism : philosophy democratized / Konstantin Kolenda., 1990
• Pragmatist Aesthetics / Richard Shusterman. Rowman Littlefield 2000. [esp. Chapter 9: 236-261)

Articles:

• Rorty R / "The Fire of Life" POETRY / NOV 2007 [available online]

• Lynch S / On Richard Rorty's use of the distinction between the private and the public

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES 15 (1): 97-120 MAR 2007

• Dombrowski DA / Rorty versus Hartshorne, or, poetry versus metaphysics (Richard Rorty, Charles Hartshorne)

METAPHILOSOPHY 38 (1): 88-110 JAN 2007

• Arriaga M / Richard Rorty's anti-foundationalism and traditional philosophy's claim of social relevance

INTERNATIONAL PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 45 (4): 467-482 DEC 2005

• Barthold LS / How hermeneutical is he? A gadamerian analysis of Richard Rorty

PHILOSOPHY TODAY 49 (3): 236-244 FAL 2005

• Stieb JA / Rorty on realism and constructivism

METAPHILOSOPHY 36 (3): 272-294 APR 2005

• Flaherty J / Rorty, religious beliefs, and pragmatism

INTERNATIONAL PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 45 (2): 175-185 JUN 2005

• Smith NH / Rorty on religion and hope

INQUIRY-AN INTERDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 48 (1): 76-98 FEB 2005

• Santos RJ / Richard Rorty's philosophy of social hope

PHILOSOPHY TODAY 47 (4): 431-440 WIN 2003

• Miller CB / Rorty and moral relativism

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 10 (3): 354-374 DEC 2002

• Abrams JJ / Aesthetics of self-fashioning and cosmopolitanism - Foucault and Rorty on the art of living

PHILOSOPHY TODAY 46 (2): 185-192 SUM 2002

• Margolis J / Dewey's and Rorty's opposed pragmatisms

TRANSACTIONS OF THE CHARLES S PEIRCE SOCIETY 38 (1-2): 117-135 WIN-SPR 2002

• Talisse RB / A pragmatist critique of Richard Rorty's hopeless politics

SOUTHERN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 39 (4): 611-626 WIN 2001

• Picardi E / Rorty, Sorge and truth

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES 9 (3): 431-439 Sp. Iss. SI AUG 2001

• McDermid DJ / Does epistemology rest on a mistake? Understanding Rorty on scepticism

CRITICA-REVISTA HISPANOAMERICANA DE FILOSOFIA 32 (96): 3-42 DEC 2000

• Owens J / The obligations of irony: Rorty on irony, autonomy, and contingency

REVIEW OF METAPHYSICS 54 (1): 27-41 SEP 2000

• Margolis J / Richard Rorty: Philosophy by other means

METAPHILOSOPHY 31 (5): 529-546 OCT 2000

• Kompridis N / So we need something else for reason to mean

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES 8 (3): 271-295 OCT 2000

• Cohen AJ / On Universalism: Commuitarians, Rorty, and ('Objectivist') 'liberal metaphysicians'

SOUTHERN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 38 (1): 39-75 SPR 2000

• Rorty R / Response to Randall Peerenboom ('Rorty and the China Challenge')

PHILOSOPHY EAST & WEST 50 (1): 90-91 JAN 2000

• Peerenboom R / The limits of irony: Rorty and the China challenge

PHILOSOPHY EAST & WEST 50 (1): 56-89 JAN 2000

[edit] See also

• Analytic philosophy
• Contributions to liberal theory
• Liberalism
• List of thinkers influenced by deconstruction
• Postanalytic philosophy
• Deconstruction-and-religion

[edit] External links

• Rorty Memorial Lecture by Jürgen Habermas, Stanford University, Nov. 2, 2007.
• Jürgen Habermas's obituary for Richard Rorty, signandsight.com, June 12, 2007.
• Dan Adleman's Obituary for Richard Rorty, June 2007.
• Danny Postel's Obituary for Richard Rorty in New Humanist, July/August 2007.
• Rorty eulogized by Richard Posner, Brian Eno, Mark Edmundson, Jürgen Habermas, Daniel Dennett, Stanley Fish, David Bromwich, Simon Blackburn, Morris Dickstein & others, Slate Magazine, June 18, 2007.

• Rorty essay, possibly his last published, "A rejoinder to Béla Egyed," March 2007, reprinted in "Kritika & Kontext," May 2007.
• Rorty essay, "Democracy and philosophy", originally delivered April 2004, in Tehran, reprinted in Kritika & Kontext, May 2007.
• Rorty review of Marc Hauser's Moral Minds, NYT Book Review, Aug. 27, 2006.
• Rorty audio, "Dewey and Posner on Pragmatism and Moral Progress," University of Chicago Law School, April 14, 2006.
• Rorty audio, informative interview by Prof. Robert P. Harrison, Nov. 22, 2005.
• Rorty review of Scott Soames's history of analytic philosophy, London Review of Books, Jan. 20, 2005.
• Rorty audio, "National Pride, National Shame," panel discussion on Achieving Our Country with responses from Angela Davis, Gordon Wood and Kathleen Sullivan, Jan. 13, 2003.
• Rorty review of Bernard Williams's Truth and Truthfulness, LRB, Oct. 31, 2002.
• PhilWeb's entry for Richard Rorty An exhaustive compilation of on-line links and off-line sources.
• Richard Rorty's last interview for Latin America at THEMIS-Law Journal, Perú
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry
• Richard Rorty essays published in Dissent (magazine)
• Rorty book reviews published at Notre Dame Philosophical Review.
• Richard Rorty; el pragmatismo y la filosofía como género literario by Adolfo Vasquez Rocca PH. D. (Spanish)
• Introduction to Rorty's Consequences of Pragmatism
• Rorty interview, Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies, conducted by Derek Nystrom & Kent Puckett, Prickly Paradigm Press, Sept. 1998.
• How Richard Rorty Found Religion in First Things

• Short film about Richard Rorty
• Rorty on Freud, NYT Book Review, October 22, 2000.
• Rorty on papal history, NYT Book Review, June 11, 2000.
• Rorty on President Clinton's legacy, New York Times op-ed, March 6, 2000.
• Rorty disagrees with Andrew Delbanco, NYT Book Review, Nov. 7, 1999.
• Rorty interview, The Atlantic Monthly, April 23, 1998.
• Rorty on Oliver North, New York Times op-ed, October 13, 1994.
• Rorty interview, Flash Art Magazine, Nov/Dec. 1993.
• New York Times Magazine profile (4600 words), "Richard Rorty: Philosopher-King", December 2, 1990 (no link available)

[edit] Notes