Richard Rorty
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"I shall count a philosopher as a cultural relativist for our purposes if I have not been able to find anyone who can explain to me why he isn't a cultural relativist. Thus I count Richard Rorty as a cultural relativist because his explicit formulations are relativist ones."--"Why Reason Can't Be Naturalized" (1982) by Hilary Putnam "Contrary to Rorty's blasé account of the emergence of Aristotle's ousia, Saint Paul's agape, and Newton's gravitas, in terms of jangled neurons or obsessional kinks, if one is to sustain a heroic view of history, git matters how the trick was done ...--Richard Rorty: Prophet and Poet of the New Pragmatism (1994) by David L. Hall "The Enlightenment philosophers were on the right track, but did not go far enough. We hope to do to Nature, Reason, and Truth what the eighteenth century did to God." --Truth, Politics and 'Post-Modernism' (1997) by Richard Rorty "There would not have been thought to be a problem about the nature of reason had our race confined itself to pointing out particular states of affairs—warning of cliffs and rain, celebrating individual births and deaths. But poetry speaks of man, birth and death as such, and mathematics prides itself on overlooking individual details. When poetry and mathematics had come to self-consciousness…the time had come for something general to be said about knowledge and universals." --Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) by Richard Rorty "I was uneasily aware, however, that there was something a bit dubious about this esotericism – this interest in socially useless flowers. I had read (in the vast amount of spare time given to a clever, snotty, nerdy only child) bits of Marius the Epicurean and also bits of Marxist criticisms of Pater's aestheticism. I was afraid that Trotsky (whose Literature and Revolution I had nibbled at) would not have approved of my interest in orchids."--"Trotsky and the Wild Orchids" (1992) by Richard Rorty |
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Richard Rorty (1931 – 2007) was an American philosopher known for books such as Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989).
Educated at the University of Chicago and Yale University, he had strong interests and training in both the history of philosophy and contemporary analytic philosophy, the latter of which came to comprise the main focus of his work at Princeton University in the 1960s. He subsequently came to reject the tradition of philosophy according to which knowledge involves correct representation (a "mirror of nature") of a world whose existence remains wholly independent of that representation. Rorty had a long and diverse academic career, including positions as Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia, and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. Among his most influential books are Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989).
Rorty saw the idea of knowledge as a "mirror of nature" as pervasive throughout the history of western philosophy. Against this approach, Rorty advocated for a novel form of American pragmatism, sometimes called neopragmatism, in which scientific and philosophical methods form merely a set of contingent "vocabularies" which people abandon or adopt over time according to social conventions and usefulness. Abandoning representationalist accounts of knowledge and language, Rorty believed, would lead to a state of mind he referred to as "ironism," in which people become completely aware of the contingency of their placement in history and of their philosophical vocabulary. Rorty tied this brand of philosophy to the notion of "social hope"; he believed that without the representationalist accounts, and without metaphors between the mind and the world, human society would behave more peacefully. He also emphasized the reasons why the interpretation of culture as conversation (Bernstein 1971), constitutes the crucial concept of a "postphilosophical" culture determined to abandon representationalist accounts of traditional epistemology, incorporating American pragmatist naturalism that considers the natural sciences as an advance towards liberalism.
Select bibliography
- As author
- Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.
- Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. Template:ISBN
- Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Template:ISBN
- Philosophical Papers vols. I–IV:
- Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Template:ISBN
- Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
- Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
- Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers IV. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
- Mind, Language, and Metaphilosophy: Early Philosophical Papers Eds. S. Leach and J. Tartaglia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Template:ISBN.
- Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Template:ISBN
- Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin, 2000.
- Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies: A Conversation with Richard Rorty. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2002.
- The Future of Religion with Gianni Vattimo Ed. Santiago Zabala. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Template:ISBN
- An Ethics for Today: Finding Common Ground Between Philosophy and Religion. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Template:ISBN
- As editor
- The Linguistic Turn, Essays in Philosophical Method, (1967), ed. by Richard M. Rorty, University of Chicago press, 1992, Template:ISBN (an introduction and two retrospective essays)
- Philosophy in History. ed. by R. Rorty, J. B. Schneewind and Quentin Skinner, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985 (an essay by R. Rorty, "Historiography of philosophy", pp. 29–76)
See also
- Trotsky and the Wild Orchids" (1992), an essay collected in Philosophy and Social Hope
- Contributions to liberal theory
- List of American philosophers
- List of thinkers influenced by deconstruction
