Richard Rorty (1931-2007) developed a pragmatist philosophy that emphasized two main principles: pragmatism on the one hand, and relativism on the other. Richard McKay Rorty was born in 1931, in New York City. He is a philosopher and professor who has written extensively on the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and American philosophy.
He grew up during the Cold War era, in which activists on the left campaigned against communism. He was part of a group of people who were both anti-Stalinists and active social activists. Rorty attended the University of Chicago at the same time as Rudolph Carnap, Charles Hartshorne, and Richard McKeon, all of whom were his teachers. After receiving his bachelor’s degree in 1949, Rorty remained in Chicago to complete his master’s degree. In 1952, he wrote a thesis on Whitehead supervised by Hartshorne. From 1952 to 1956, Rorty was at Yale University, where he wrote a dissertation titled “The Concept of Potential.”
After completing his Ph.D., Rorty spent two years in the army before landing his first academic appointment at Wellesley College. He spent three years at Wellesley College before moving on to Princeton University in 1961. He spent the next twenty-two years at the University of Virginia, where he was appointed Kenan Professor of the Humanities in 1982.
Rorty left the University of Virginia in 1998 and moved to Stanford University to become a professor of comparative literature, then onwards he received a number of prestigious awards during his career, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship. He has delivered a number of prestigious lectures across several western universities.
Among his most famous works, Rorty’s critique of philosophy relies on the provocative account offered in his book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. In this book, Rorty argues that the way that we view the world is shaped by the way that we look at ourselves. In this book, and in the closely related essays collected in Consequences of Pragmatism Rorty’s primary target is knowledge as representation, knowledge as a mental reflection of the mind and the outside world. A philosophical idea that influenced many.
His theories developed more richly in later works, such as Emergencies, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), in Popular Essays and Collected Essays on Philosophy and Social Hope (1999) , and in the four volumes of the Philosophical Papers, Objective, Relativity, and Truth (1991); Truth and Progress (1998) ; and Philosophy as Cultural Policy (2007). Rorty’s writings cover a wide range of intellectual topics, and his approach to these topics is highly integrated and multi-faceted. This has made him one of the most talked-about philosophers in recent years.
