Richard Rorty
Born
Richard McKay Rorty

(1931-10-04)October 4, 1931
New York City, New York, U.S.
DiedJune 8, 2007(2007-06-08) (aged 75)
Palo Alto, California, U.S.
Alma mater
Era20th-century philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
SchoolNeopragmatism[1] (early)
Postanalytic philosophy (late)
Institutions
Doctoral advisorPaul Weiss
Doctoral studentsRobert Brandom, Michael Williams
Main interests
Notable ideas

Richard McKay Rorty (October 4, 1931 – June 8, 2007) was an American philosopher. Educated at the University of Chicago and Yale University, he had strong interests and training in both the history of philosophy and in contemporary analytic philosophy. Rorty's academic career included appointments as the 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 rejected the long-held idea that correct internal representations of objects in the outside world is a necessary prerequisite for knowledge. Rorty argued instead that knowledge is an internal and linguistic affair; knowledge relates only to our own language.[3][4] Rorty argues that language is made up of vocabularies that are temporary and historical,[5] and concludes that "since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths."[6] The acceptance of the preceding arguments leads to what Rorty calls "ironism"; a state of mind where people are completely aware that their knowledge is dependent on their time and place in history, and are therefore somewhat detached from their own beliefs.[7] However, Rorty also argues that "a belief can still regulate action, can still be thought worth dying for, among people who are quite aware that this belief is caused by nothing deeper than contingent historical circumstance."[8]

Biography

Richard Rorty was born on October 4, 1931, in New York City.[9] His parents, James and Winifred Rorty, were activists, writers and social democrats. His maternal grandfather, Walter Rauschenbusch, was a central figure in the Social Gospel movement of the early 20th century.[10]

His father experienced two nervous breakdowns in his later life. The second breakdown, which he had in the early 1960s, was more serious and "included claims to divine prescience."[11] Consequently, Richard Rorty fell into depression as a teenager and in 1962 began a six-year psychiatric analysis for obsessional neurosis.[11] Rorty wrote about the beauty of rural New Jersey orchids in his short autobiography, "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids," and his desire to combine aesthetic beauty and social justice.[12] His colleague Jürgen Habermas's obituary for Rorty points out that Rorty's childhood experiences led him to a vision of philosophy as the reconciliation of "the celestial beauty of orchids with Trotsky's dream of justice on earth."[13] Habermas describes Rorty as an ironist:

Nothing is sacred to Rorty the ironist. Asked at the end of his life about the "holy", the strict atheist answered with words reminiscent of the young Hegel: "My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law."[13]

Rorty enrolled at the University of Chicago shortly before turning 15, where he received a bachelor's and a master's degree in philosophy (studying under Richard McKeon),[14][15] continuing at Yale University for a PhD in philosophy (1952–1956).[16] He married another academic, Amélie Oksenberg (Harvard University professor), with whom he had a son, Jay Rorty, in 1954. After two years in the United States Army, he taught at Wellesley College for three years until 1961.[17] Rorty divorced his wife and then married Stanford University bioethicist Mary Varney in 1972. They had two children, Kevin and Patricia, now Max. While Richard Rorty was a "strict atheist" (Habermas),[13] Mary Varney Rorty was a practicing Mormon.[11]

Rorty was a professor of philosophy at Princeton University for 21 years.[17] In 1981, he was a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, commonly known as the "Genius Award", in its first year of awarding, and in 1982 he became Kenan Professor of the Humanities at the University of Virginia, working closely with colleagues and students in multiple departments, especially in English.[18] In 1998 Rorty became professor of comparative literature (and philosophy, by courtesy), at Stanford University, where he spent the remainder of his academic career.[18] During this period he was especially popular, and once quipped that he had been assigned to the position of "transitory professor of trendy studies."[19]

Rorty's doctoral dissertation, The Concept of Potentiality was a historical study of the concept, completed under the supervision of Paul Weiss, but his first book (as editor), The Linguistic Turn (1967), was firmly in the prevailing analytic mode, collecting classic essays on the linguistic turn in analytic philosophy. 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 Willard Van Orman 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 the meaning of a proposition is determined by its use in linguistic practice. 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. Rorty wrote in his Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989):

Truth cannot be out there—cannot exist independently of the human mind—because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own unaided by the describing activities of humans cannot. (p. 5)

Views like this led Rorty to question many of philosophy's most basic assumptions—and have also led to his being apprehended as a postmodern/deconstructionist philosopher. Indeed, from the late 1980s through the 1990s, Rorty focused on the continental philosophical tradition, examining the works of Friederich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida. His work from this period included: Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989); Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers II (1991); and Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers III (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 Edmund Husserl shared with Rudolf Carnap and Bertrand 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 his writings, including Philosophy as Cultural Politics (Philosophical Papers IV), and Achieving Our Country (1998), a political manifesto partly based on readings of Dewey and Walt Whitman in which he defended the idea of a progressive, pragmatic left against what he feels are defeatist, anti-liberal, anti-humanist positions espoused by the critical left and continental school. Rorty felt these anti-humanist positions were personified by figures like Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault. Such theorists were also guilty of an "inverted Platonism" in which they attempted to craft overarching, metaphysical, "sublime" philosophies—which in fact contradicted their core claims to be ironist and contingent.

According to Eduardo Mendieta "Rorty described himself as a 'postmodern bourgeois liberal', even if he also attacked the academic left, though not for being anti-truth, but for being unpatriotic. Rorty’s Zen attitude about truth could easily be confused for a form of political relativism—a Machiavellian type of politics."[20]

Rorty's last works, after his move to Stanford University concerned the place of religion in contemporary life, liberal communities, comparative literature and philosophy as "cultural politics."

Shortly before his death, he wrote a piece called "The Fire of Life" (published in the November 2007 issue of Poetry magazine)[21] 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. Cultures with richer vocabularies are more fully human—farther removed from the beasts—than those with poorer ones; individual men and women are more fully human when their memories are amply stocked with verses.

On June 8, 2007, Rorty died in his home from pancreatic cancer.[16][18][22]

Major works

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. When we give up this metaphor, the entire enterprise of foundationalist epistemology simply dissolves.

An epistemological 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. Rorty however criticized both the idea that arguments can be based upon self-evident premises (within language) and the idea that arguments can be based upon noninferential sensations (outside language).

The first critique draws on Quine's work on sentences thought to be analytically true – that is, sentences thought to be true solely by virtue of what they mean and independently of fact.[23] Quine argues that the problem with analytically true sentences is the attempt to convert identity-based but empty analytical truths like "no unmarried man is married" to synonymity-based analytical truths like "no bachelor is married."[24] When trying to do so, one must first prove that "unmarried man" and "bachelor" means exactly the same, and that is not possible without considering facts – that is, looking towards the domain of synthetic truths. When doing so, one will notice that the two concepts actually differ; "bachelor" sometimes mean "bachelor of arts" for instance.[25] Quine therefore argues that "a boundary between analytic and synthetic statements simply has not been drawn", and concludes that this boundary or distinction "[...] is an unempirical dogma of empiricists, a metaphysical article of faith."[26]

The second critique draws on Sellars's work on the empiricist idea that there is a non-linguistic but epistemologically relevant "given" available in sensory perception. Sellars argue that only language can work as a foundation for arguments; non-linguistic sensory perceptions are incompatible with language and are therefore irrelevant. In Sellars' view, the claim that there is an epistemologically relevant "given" in sensory perception is a myth; a fact is not something that is given to us, it is something that we as language-users actively take. Only after we have learned a language is it possible for us to construe as "empirical data" the particulars and arrays of particulars we have come to be able to observe.[27]

Each critique, taken alone, provides a problem for a conception of how philosophy ought to proceed but leaves enough of the tradition intact to proceed with its former aspirations. Combined, Rorty claimed, the two critiques are devastating. With no privileged realm of truth or meaning that can work as a self-evident foundation for our arguments, we have instead only truth defined as beliefs that pay their way: in other words, beliefs that are useful to us somehow. The only worthwhile description of the actual process of inquiry, Rorty claimed, was a Kuhnian account of the standard phases of the progress of disciplines, oscillating through normal and abnormal periods, between routine problem-solving and intellectual crises.

After rejecting foundationalism, Rorty argues that one of the few roles 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 suggests that each generation tries to subject all disciplines to the model that the most successful discipline of the day employs. In Rorty's view, the success of modern science has led academics in philosophy and the humanities to mistakenly imitate scientific methods.

Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), Rorty argues that there is no worthwhile theory of truth, aside from the non-epistemic semantic theory Donald Davidson developed (based on the work of Alfred Tarski).[28] Rorty also suggests that there are two kinds of philosophers; philosophers occupied with private or public matters. Private philosophers, who provide one with greater abilities to (re)create oneself (a view adapted from Nietzsche)[29] and which Rorty also identifies with the novels of Marcel Proust and Vladimir Nabokov) should not be expected to help with public problems. For a public philosophy, one might instead turn to philosophers like Rawls or Habermas,[30] even though, according to Rorty, the latter is a "liberal who doesn't want to be an ironist".[31] While Habermas believes that his theory of communicative rationality constitutes an update of rationalism, Rorty thinks that the latter and any "universal" pretensions should be totally abandoned.[32]

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." Consistent with his anti-foundationalism, Rorty states that there is "[...] no noncircular theoretical backup for the belief that cruelty is horrible."[33]

Rorty also introduces the terminology of ironism, which he uses to describe his mindset and his philosophy. Rorty describes the ironist as a person who "[...] worries that the process of socialization which turned her into a human being by giving her a language may have given her the wrong language, and so turned her into the wrong kind of human being. But she cannot give a criterion of wrongness."[34]

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. Rorty argues that liberalism can "get along without philosophical presuppositions," while at the same time conceding to communitarians that "a conception of the self that makes the community constitutive of the self does comport well with liberal democracy."[35] Moreover, for Rorty Rawls could be compared to Habermas, a sort of United States' Habermas, with E. Mendieta's words: "An Enlightenment figure who thought that all we have is communicative reason and the use of public reason, two different names for the same thing—the use of reason by a public for the purpose of deciding how to live collectively and what aims should be the goal of the public good".[20] For Rorty, social institutions ought to be thought of as "experiments in cooperation rather than as attempts to embody a universal and ahistorical order."[36]

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 with American pragmatists, in that they critique metaphysics and reject the correspondence theory of truth.[37] Taking up and developing what he had argued in previous works,[38] 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 (or literary) "method". In this vein, Rorty criticizes Derrida's followers like Paul de Man for taking deconstructive literary theory too seriously.

Achieving Our Country

In Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (1997), Rorty differentiates between what he sees as the two sides of the Left, a cultural Left and a progressive Left. He criticizes the cultural Left, which is exemplified by post-structuralists such as Foucault and postmodernists such as Lyotard, for offering critiques of society, but no alternatives (or alternatives that are so vague and general as to be abdications). Although these intellectuals make insightful claims about the ills of society, Rorty suggests that they provide no alternatives and even occasionally deny the possibility of progress. On the other hand, the progressive Left, exemplified for Rorty by the pragmatist John Dewey, Whitman and James Baldwin, makes hope for a better future its priority. Without hope, Rorty argues, change is spiritually inconceivable and the cultural Left has begun to breed cynicism. Rorty sees the progressive Left as acting in the philosophical spirit of pragmatism.

On human rights

Rorty's notion of human rights is grounded on the notion of sentimentality. He contended that throughout history humans have devised various means of construing certain groups of individuals as inhuman or subhuman. Thinking in rationalist (foundationalist) terms will not solve this problem, he claimed. Rorty advocated the creation of a culture of global human rights in order to stop violations from happening through a sentimental education. He argued that we should create a sense of empathy or teach empathy to others so as to understand others' suffering.[39]

On hope

Rorty advocates for what philosopher Nick Gall characterizes as a "boundless hope" or type of "melancholic meliorism." According to this view, Rorty replaces foundationalist hopes for certainty with those of perpetual growth and constant change, which he believes enables us to send conversation and hopes in new directions we currently can't imagine.[40]

Rorty articulates this boundless hope in his 1982 book Consequences of Pragmatism,[41] where he applies his framework of wholesale hope versus retail hope. Herein he says, "Let me sum up by offering a third and final characterization of pragmatism: It is the doctrine that there are no constraints on inquiry save conversational ones-no wholesale constraints derived from the nature of the objects, or of the mind, or of language, but only those retail constraints provided by the remarks of our fellow inquirers."

Reception and criticism

Rorty is among the most widely discussed and controversial contemporary philosophers,[17] and his works have provoked thoughtful responses from many other well-respected figures in the field. In Robert Brandom's anthology 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.[42] In 2007, Roger Scruton wrote, "Rorty was paramount among those thinkers who advance their own opinion as immune to criticism, by pretending that it is not truth but consensus that counts, while defining the consensus in terms of people like themselves."[43] Ralph Marvin Tumaob concludes that Rorty was influenced by Jean-François Lyotard's metanarratives, and added that "postmodernism was influenced further by the works of Rorty".[44]

McDowell is strongly influenced by Rorty, particularly Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979).[45] In continental philosophy, authors such as Jürgen Habermas, Gianni Vattimo, Jacques Derrida, Albrecht Wellmer, Hans Joas, Chantal Mouffe, Simon Critchley, Esa Saarinen, and Mike Sandbothe are influenced in different ways by Rorty's thinking. American novelist David Foster Wallace titled a short story in his collection Oblivion: Stories "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature," and critics have identified Rorty's influence in some of Wallace's writings on irony.[46]

Susan Haack has been a fierce critic of Rorty's neopragmatism. Haack criticises Rorty's claim to be a pragmatist at all and wrote a short play called We Pragmatists, where Rorty and Charles Sanders Peirce have a fictional conversation using only accurate quotes from their own writing. For Haack, the only link between Rorty's neopragmatism and Peirce's pragmatism is the name. Haack believes Rorty's neopragmatism is anti-philosophical and anti-intellectual, and exposes people further to rhetorical manipulation.[17][47][48]

Although Rorty was an avowed liberal, his political and moral philosophies have been attacked by commentators from the Left, some of whom believe them to be insufficient frameworks for social justice.[49] Rorty was also criticized for his rejection of the idea that science can depict the world.[50] One criticism, especially of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, is that Rorty's philosophical hero, the ironist, is an elitist figure.[51] Rorty argues that most people would be "commonsensically nominalist and historicist" but not ironist. They would combine an ongoing attention to the particular as opposed to the transcendent (nominalism) with an awareness of their place in a continuum of contingent lived experience alongside other individuals (historicist), without necessarily having continual doubts about the resulting worldview as the ironist does. An ironist is someone who "has radical and continuing doubts about their final vocabulary", that is "a set of words which they [humans] employ to justify their actions, their beliefs, and their lives"; "realizes that argument phrased in their vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts"; and "does not think their vocabulary is closer to reality than others".[52] On the other hand, the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo and the Spanish philosopher Santiago Zabala in their 2011 book Hermeneutic Communism: from Heidegger to Marx affirm that

together with Richard Rorty we also consider it a flaw that "the main thing contemporary academic Marxists inherit from Marx and Engels is the conviction that the quest for the cooperative commonwealth should be scientific rather than utopian, knowing rather than romantic." As we will show hermeneutics contains all the utopian and romantic features that Rorty refers to because, contrary to the knowledge of science, it does not claim modern universality but rather postmodern particularism.[53]

Rorty often draws on a broad range of other philosophers to support his views, and his interpretation of their work has been contested.[17] Since he is working from a tradition of reinterpretation, he is not interested in "accurately" portraying other thinkers, but rather in using it 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. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty attempts to disarm those who criticize his writings by arguing that their philosophical criticisms are made using axioms that are explicitly rejected within Rorty's own philosophy.[54] For instance, he defines allegations of irrationality as affirmations of vernacular "otherness", and so—Rorty argues—accusations of irrationality can be expected during any argument and must simply be brushed aside.[55]

Awards and honors

Select bibliography

As author
  • Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.
  • Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. ISBN 978-0816610631
  • Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ISBN 978-0521353816
  • Philosophical Papers vols. I–IV:
    • Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ISBN 978-0521353694
    • 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. ISBN 978-1107612297.
  • Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. ISBN 978-0674003118
  • 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. ISBN 978-0231134941
  • An Ethics for Today: Finding Common Ground Between Philosophy and Religion. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. ISBN 978-0231150569
  • What's the Use of Truth? with Pascal Engel, transl. by William McCuaig, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007 ISBN 9780231140140
  • On Philosophy and Philosophers: Unpublished papers 1960-2000, Ed. by W. P. Małecki and Chris Vopa, CUPress 2020 ISBN 9781108488457
  • Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism, Ed. E. Mendieta, foreword by Robert B. Brandom, Harvard UP 2021, ISBN 9780674248915
As editor
  • The Linguistic Turn, Essays in Philosophical Method, (1967), edited by Richard M. Rorty, University of Chicago Press, 1992, ISBN 978-0226725697 (an introduction and two retrospective essays)
  • Philosophy in History. edited by Richard M. Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985 (an essay by Richard M. Rorty, "Historiography of Philosophy", pp. 29–76)

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Pragmatism – Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  2. ↑ Richard Rorty (1931—2007) – Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  3. ↑ Robert Brandom summarizes Rorty's anti-representationalism "In a nutshell, this is how I think Rorty's critique of semantic representationalism goes: Normative relations are exclusively intravocabulary. Extravocabulary relations are exclusively causal. Representation purports to be both a normative relation, supporting assessments of correctness and incorrectness, and a relation between representings within a vocabulary and representeds outside of that vocabulary. Therefore, the representational model of the relation of vocabularies to their environment should be rejected." Brandom, Robert (11 October 2000). Vocabularies of Pragmatism: Synthesizing Naturalism and Historicism. (In: Rorty and His Critics). Malden, Mass. p. 160. ISBN 0-631-20981-6. OCLC 43109795.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  4. ↑ Rorty distinguished between knowledge-that and knowledge-how; only language users can have knowledge-that (epistemically valid knowledge) while all life forms, including bacteria and virus, can have "knowledge-how" (know-how). Rorty, Richard (11 October 2000). Response to Barry Allen. (In: Rorty and His Critics). Malden, Mass. pp. 238–239. ISBN 0-631-20981-6. OCLC 43109795.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  5. ↑ Rorty, Richard (1982). Consequences of pragmatism: Essays, 1972-1980. Minneapolis. p. 158. ISBN 0-8166-1064-9. OCLC 8222790.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  6. ↑ Rorty, Richard (1989). Contingency, irony, and solidarity. Cambridge. pp. 6, 21. ISBN 0-521-35381-5. OCLC 18290785. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that. [...] [S]ince truth is a property of sentences, since sentences are dependent for their existence upon vocabularies, and since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  7. ↑ "The ironist spends her time worrying about the possibility that she has been initiated into the wrong tribe, taught to play the wrong language game. She worries that the process of socialization which turned her into a human being by giving her a language may have given her the wrong language, and so turned her into the wrong kind of human being. But she cannot give a criterion of wrongness. So, the more she is driven to articulate her situation in philosophical terms, the more she reminds herself of her rootlessness by constantly using terms like Weltanschauung, 'perspective', dialectic, conceptual framework, 'historical epoch', language game, 'redescription', 'vocabulary' and 'irony'." Rorty, Richard (1989). Contingency, irony, and solidarity. Cambridge. p. 75. ISBN 0-521-35381-5. OCLC 18290785.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  8. ↑ Rorty, Richard (1989). Contingency, irony, and solidarity. Cambridge. p. 189. ISBN 0-521-35381-5. OCLC 18290785.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  9. ↑ "Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher". press.uchicago.edu. 1931-10-04. Retrieved 2012-09-26.
  10. ↑ Bernstein, Adam (11 June 2007). "Richard Rorty, 75; Leading U.S. Pragmatist Philosopher". washingtonpost.com. Retrieved 26 September 2012.
  11. 1 2 3 Bruce Kuklick. "Neil Gross, Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher." Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 47.1 (2011):36.
  12. ↑ Casey Nelson Blake, "Private Life and Public Commitment: From Walter Rauschenbusch to Richard Rorty," in A Pragmatist's Progress?: Richard Rorty and American Intellectual History, ed. John Pettegrew (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 85. ISBN 9780847690626
  13. 1 2 3 "Jürgen Habermas: Philosopher, poet and friend (12/06/2007)". signandsight. Retrieved 2012-09-26.
  14. ↑ Marchetti, Giancarlo. "Interview with Richard Rorty." Philosophy Now Volume 43, Oct.–Nov. 2003.
  15. ↑ Ryerson, James. "The Quest for Uncertainty: Richard Rorty's Pragmatic Pilgrimage" Linguafranca Vol. 10, No. 9. December 2000/January 2001.
  16. 1 2 "Richard Rorty, distinguished public intellectual and controversial philosopher, dead at 75" (Stanford's announcement), June 10, 2007
  17. 1 2 3 4 5 Ramberg, Bjørn (August 1, 2009). "Richard Rorty". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University – via Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  18. 1 2 3 4 "Richard Rorty, Philosopher, Dies at 75" (NY Times Obituary), June 11, 2007
  19. ↑ Ryerson, James. "Essay: Thinking Cheerfully." The New York Times Book Review. July 22, 2007: p. 27.
  20. 1 2 Mendieta, Eduardo (22 July 2017). "Rorty and Post-Post Truth". lareviewofbooks. Retrieved 13 April 2023.
  21. ↑ Rorty, Richard (November 2007). "The Fire of Life". Poetry Magazine.
  22. ↑ "Richard Rorty," (short obituary), June 9, 2007.
  23. ↑ Quine, W.V. (1961). From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-Philosophical Essays, Second Revised Edition. Harper torchbooks. Harvard University Press. p. 21. ISBN 978-0-674-32351-3. Retrieved 2021-04-02.
  24. ↑ Quine, W.V. (1961). From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-Philosophical Essays, Second Revised Edition. Harper torchbooks. Harvard University Press. pp. 21–22. ISBN 978-0-674-32351-3. Retrieved 2021-04-02.
  25. ↑ Quine, W.V. (1961). From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-Philosophical Essays, Second Revised Edition. Harper torchbooks. Harvard University Press. p. 28. ISBN 978-0-674-32351-3. Retrieved 2021-04-02.
  26. ↑ Quine, W.V. (1961). From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-Philosophical Essays, Second Revised Edition. Harper torchbooks. Harvard University Press. p. 37. ISBN 978-0-674-32351-3. Retrieved 2021-04-02.
  27. ↑ Sellars, W.; Brandom, W.S.R.; Rorty, P.C.L.R.; Rorty, R.; Brandom, R. (1997). Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Minnesota studies in the philosophy of science. Harvard University Press. pp. 116–117. ISBN 978-0-674-25154-0. Retrieved 2021-04-02.
  28. ↑ Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. pp. 11-22. ISBN 978-0521353816
  29. ↑ Rorty argues that Nietzsche was the first philosopher to propose to totally abandon the concept of objective truth. For Nietzsche human beings should draw consolation not simply by trying to rise from the condition of pure animality, but by the awareness of having "self-created". Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. pp. 23-43. ISBN 978-0521353816
  30. ↑ Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. pp. 56-70. ISBN 978-0521353816
  31. ↑ Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. p. 61. ISBN 978-0521353816
  32. ↑ Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. p. 68. ISBN 978-0521353816
  33. ↑ Rorty, R.; Rorty, P.C.L.R.; Cambridge University Press; Richard, R. (1989). Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Clark lectures. Cambridge University Press. p. xv. ISBN 978-0-521-36781-3. Retrieved 2021-04-08.
  34. ↑ Rorty, R.; Rorty, P.C.L.R.; Cambridge University Press; Richard, R. (1989). Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Clark lectures. Cambridge University Press. p. 75. ISBN 978-0-521-36781-3. Retrieved 2021-04-08.
  35. ↑ Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1 (1990), p. 179
  36. ↑ Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1 (1990), p. 196
  37. ↑ Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
  38. ↑ Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. pp. 122-135. ISBN 978-0521353816
  39. ↑ See Barreto, José-Manuel. "Rorty and Human Rights: Contingency, Emotions and How to Defend Human Rights Telling Stories." Utrecht Law Review, Volume 7 Issue 2 April 2011
  40. ↑ Gall, Nick. "Dewey and Rorty: Sending Pragmatist Hopes in New Directions." November, 2022, Erraticus.
  41. ↑ Rorty, Richard (1982). Consequences of Hope. University of Minnesota Press.,
  42. ↑ Brandom, Robert B. (October 3, 2000). Rorty and His Critics. Wiley. ISBN 0631209824.
  43. ↑ Scruton, Roger (2007-06-12). "Richard Rorty's legacy". openDemocracy. Retrieved 2012-09-26.
  44. ↑ "Rorty's Philosophy & the Mirror of Nature (pdf)". October 18, 2016.
  45. ↑ In the preface to Mind and World (pp. ix–x) McDowell writes, "it will be obvious that Rorty's work is ... central for the way I define my stance here".
  46. ↑ Howard, Jennifer. "The Afterlife of David Foster Wallace". Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved 30 December 2013.
  47. ↑ Susan Haack (November 1997). "Vulgar Rortyism". New Criterion.
  48. ↑ Haack, Susan (1993). "Ch. 9: Vulgar Pragmatism: an Unedifying Prospect". Evidence and Inquiry. Oxford UK: Blackwell. ISBN 978-0631118510. OL 1398949M.
  49. ↑ "Objectivity and Action: Wal-Mart and the Legacy of Marx and Nietzsche", A discussion of Terry Eagleton's attacks on Rorty's philosophy as insufficient in the fight against corporations such as Wal-Mart
  50. ↑ "The failure to recognize science's particular powers to depict reality, Daniel Dennett wrote, shows 'flatfooted ignorance of the proven methods of scientific truth-seeking and their power.'"
  51. ↑ "Rob Reich – The Paradoxes of Education in Rorty's Liberal Utopia". Archived from the original on June 15, 2006.
  52. ↑ Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. p. 73 ISBN 978-0521353816
  53. ↑ Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala. Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx Columbia University Press. 2011. Pp. 2–3
  54. ↑ Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. p. 44 ISBN 978-0521353816
  55. ↑ Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. p. 48 ISBN 978-0521353816
  56. ↑ "Richard M. Rorty". www.gf.org. John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Retrieved 2 September 2020.
  57. ↑ "Richard McKay Rorty". www.amacad.org. American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Retrieved 2 September 2020.
  58. ↑ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 2021-06-08.
  59. ↑ "2007 Thomas Jefferson Medal". American Philosophical Society. Retrieved September 2, 2020.

Further reading

  • Randall Auxier, Eli Kramer, Krzysztof Piotr Skowroński, eds., Rorty and Beyond, 2019
  • Ulf Schulenberg, Romanticism and Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Idea of a Poeticized Culture, 2015
  • Krzysztof Piotr Skowroński, Values, Valuations, and Axiological Norms in Richard Rorty's Neopragmatism, 2015
  • Marianne Janack, What We Mean By Experience, 2012
  • Marianne Janack, editor, Feminist Interpretations of Richard Rorty, 2010
  • James Tartaglia, Richard Rorty: Critical Assessments, 4 vols., 2009
  • Neil Gross, Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher, 2008
  • Gross, Neil. 2019. Richard Rorty: the Making of an American Philosopher. University of Chicago Press.
  • Rorty's Politics of Redescription / Gideon Calder, 2007
  • Rorty and the Mirror of Nature / James Tartaglia, 2007
  • Richard Rorty: Pragmatism and Political Liberalism / Michael Bacon, 2007
  • Richard Rorty: politics and vision / Christopher Voparil, 2006
  • Richard Rorty: his philosophy under discussion / Andreas Vieth, 2005
  • Richard Rorty / Charles B Guignon., 2003
  • Rorty / Gideon Calder, 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
  • 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
  • Richard Rorty's politics: liberalism at the end of the American century / Markar Melkonian, 1999
  • The work of friendship: Rorty, his critics, and the project of solidarity / Dianne Rothleder, 1999
  • 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
  • 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
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.