Richard Rorty 1931 – 2007
Richard Rorty was an American philosopher who began in the analytic tradition and gradually became its most celebrated internal critic. His Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature dismantled the picture of the mind as the mirror of an antecedent reality and called for a turn from epistemology to a hermeneutic and conversational understanding of human inquiry. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity he developed a liberal political vision rooted in expanded sympathy rather than universal reason. His later Achieving Our Country diagnosed a crisis of the American left. He held chairs at Princeton, Virginia, and Stanford.
Key facts
- Nationality
- American
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Pragmatism, Analytic
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Richard Rorty:
“Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.”
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Attributed to Richard Rorty:
“There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.”
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Attributed to Richard Rorty:
“Solidarity is created, not discovered.”
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Attributed to Richard Rorty:
“Liberalism is the hope that suffering will be diminished, that the humiliation of human beings by other human beings may cease.”
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Attributed to Richard Rorty:
“A talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change.”