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.

Richard Rorty was born in 1931 in New York, the son of the anti-Stalinist writers James Rorty and Winifred Raushenbush and grandson of the Social Gospel theologian Walter Rauschenbusch. He entered the University of Chicago at fifteen, took degrees there under Carnap and Charles Hartshorne, and his doctorate at Yale in 1956 with a dissertation on the concept of potentiality. He taught at Wellesley and then for two decades at Princeton.

His major works are the edited anthology The Linguistic Turn (1967), Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), the essay collections Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (1991), Essays on Heidegger and Others (1991), and Truth and Progress (1998), the philosophical-political Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), and the political essay Achieving Our Country (1998). In 1982 he left Princeton for the University of Virginia and in 1998 for Stanford.

Rorty broke with the analytic mainstream from within, rejecting representationalist and foundationalist images of the mind and reviving the pragmatism of James and Dewey for a postmodern audience. His liberal ironist — committed to social hope and contingent solidarity while abandoning metaphysical underwriting — became one of the most discussed philosophical figures of the late twentieth century. He died of pancreatic cancer at Palo Alto in 2007.