190 - Rorty, Richard

Summary

Richard Rorty (1931–2007) was an American philosopher and public intellectual. After earning a Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University in 1956, Rorty secured professorships at Wellesley College and Princeton University. He spent twenty years in Princeton’s Philosophy Department, and then took up the Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia in 1982. In 1997, he moved to Stanford University’s Comparative Literature department.

Rorty’s earliest work is focused on standard topics in analytic philosophy, including meaning, reference, intentionality, and materialism. He was an early defender of a broadly Quinean naturalism and a Sellarsian eliminativism in the philosophy of mind. By the 1970s, however, Rorty’s interests began to expand and he drew inspiration from Martin Heidegger, the later Wittgenstein, Jacques Derrida, and especially John Dewey. These shifts resulted in Rorty’s highly influential 1979 book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Calling his view pragmatism, Rorty argues for a radical version of anti-foundationalism according to which all of the traditional aims of philosophy – including truth, rationality, knowledge, objectivity, and the accurate representation of reality – are rendered disposable. In place of these philosophical objectives, Rorty offers the pragmatized ideals of solidarity, empathy, shared hopes, unforced agreement, and social progress along social democratic lines. Rejecting the very idea of a philosophical foundation for these aims, Rorty unabashedly embraces “ethnocentrism.” In fact, he endorses what he calls “ironism,” claiming that it is the mark of a civilized person to be willing to stand unflinchingly for these ideals even after he or she realizes that they lack any philosophical grounding whatsoever.