Richard Rorty

Richard McKay Rorty (born October 4, 1931 in New York City) is an American philosopher. He is currently an emeritus professor of comparative literature at Stanford University.

Career

Early work

Rorty attended the University of Chicago and Yale University, and he spent his early career trying to reconcile his personal interests and beliefs with the Platonic search for Truth. His doctoral dissertation, "The Concept of Potentiality", and his first book (as editor), The Linguistic Turn (1967), were firmly in the prevailing analytic mode. 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 W.V.O. Quine and Wilfrid Sellars, caused significant shifts in his thinking.

Pragmatists generally hold that a proposition is true if its believing helps us solve a given problem. They deny that the truth of propositions hinges on their correspondence to the facts, or on their capacity to make the web of our beliefs more coherent. Rorty combines pragmatism about truth and other matters with a 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. This intellectual framework allows him to question many of philosophy's most basic assumptions.

Major works

In his magnum opus, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Rorty argued that epistemology, the theory of knowledge, is a product of the false view that the main function of the mind is to faithfully represent a mind-independent external reality. The book claims that each generation tends to try to subject all disciplines to the model that the most successful discipline of the day employs. On Rorty's view, the success of modern science has led academics in philosophy and the humanities to mistakenly imitate scientific methods. Although some writers interpret the work as degrading science by denying it any contact with a mind-independent reality, Rorty was not trying to demean its importance and he even argued against Wittgenstein that psychology is a valid discipline. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature popularized and extended ideas of Wilfred Sellars (the critique of the Myth of the given) and W. V. O. Quine (the critique of the analytic-synthetic distinction) and others to practice the doctrine of "dissolving" rather than solving philosophical problems

Amongst the compilation Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Vol. 1, Rorty included an essay entitled "The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy". In this, he defended Rawls against communitarian critics and argued that personal ideals of perfection and standards of truth were no more needed in politics than a state religion. He saw Rawls' concept of reflective equilibrium as a more appropriate way of approaching political decision-making in modern liberal democracies.

Rorty's other major work, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, was published in 1989. In it, Rorty abandons the attempt to explain his theories in analytic terms and creates an alternative conceptual schema to that of the "Platonists" he rejects. This schema is based on the belief that there is no 'truth' higher than one's ability to (re)create himself, a view adapted from Nietzsche and which Rorty also identifies with the novels of Proust and Henry James. This book also marks his first attempt to specifically articulate a political vision consonant 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' policed by the separation of the public and private realms of life.

Later work

In the early 1990s, Rorty focused on the continental philosophical tradition, examining the work by Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. His work from this period included Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers (1991) and Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers (1998). These works attempt to bridge the gap between analytic and continental philosophies by claiming the two traditions complement, rather than oppose each other:

Analytic philosophy may not have lived up to its pretensions, and may not have solved the puzzles it thought it had. Yet in the process of finding reasons for putting those pretensions and those puzzles aside it helped earn itself an important place in the history of ideas. By giving up on the quest for apodicticity and finality that Husserl shared with Carnap and Russell, and by finding new reasons for thinking that that quest will never succeed, it cleared a path that leads us past scientism, just as the German idealists cleared a path that led us around empiricism. The anti-empiricist lesson of German idealism took a long time to learn, and so may the anti-scientistic lesson of analytic philosophy. But someday intellectual historians may be able to see these apparently opposed movements as complementary ^*.

Reception and criticism

Because of the clarity and humor of his writing style, and his ability to question cherished assumptions, Rorty is one of the most widely-read contemporary philosophers. His political and moral philosophies have been under almost constant attack both from some on the Right, who call them relativist and irresponsible, and some on the Left, who believe them to be insufficient frameworks for social justice. The most common criticism is that Rorty's work is self-refuting (see Nagel and Nozick for instance), although supporters of Rorty consider these to play directly into his theories about arguing within versus arguing outside of a given 'language-game'.

In Daniel Dennett's humorous Philosophical Lexicon^*, 'Rorty' is defined as 'incorrigible', which is a neat summing up both of Rorty's career and much of the philosophic community's reaction to it.

Some interpreted passages in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity as suggesting an elitist class of intellectuals^*. Rorty had claimed that the majority of people would be "commensensically nominalist and historicist" but not ironist. This criticism was based on a misunderstanding. Rorty said that ironism was only needed for intellectuals as it is only intellectuals who are "haunted" by the Western tradition of metaphysics and epistemology. To everyone else, ironism seems like a huge overreaction.

Rorty often draws on a broad range of other philosophers to support his views; Dewey is his favourite, but he has also called upon Heidegger, Wittgenstein, James and Hegel at different times. Some see his interpretation of these thinkers to be distorted^* and think they agree with him much less than he makes out. Rorty considers himself to be a pragmatist, but some see his rejection of applying scientific method to the humanities as invalidating this claim. Rorty's defence is that he interprets philosophers in much the same way as novelists are traditionally interpreted. This leads to more sympathetic views of most figures; it is very rare for Rorty to completely reject a philosopher's value. His essay "The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres" is a thorough description of how he treats the greats in the history of philosophy.

Debates on Rorty's work has often been ill-tempered due to his attacks on the central tenants of modern philosophy. However, he has a reputation as a "nice guy" and generally avoids heated arguments himself. A rare case of him losing his temper came with his attack on evangelist Pat Robertson in an essay in Philosophy and Social Hope.

At present

Over the past fifteen years Rorty has continued to publish voluminously, including three volumes of philosophical papers; Achieving Our Country, a political manifesto partly based on readings of John Dewey and Walt Whitman in which Rorty defends the idea of a progressive, pragmatic left against what he feels are anti-action positions espoused by the so-called critical left personified by figures like Michel Foucault; and Philosophy and Social Hope, a collection of essays for a general audience.

Having held teaching positions at Wellesley College, Princeton University, and the University of Virginia, Rorty is currently professor Emeritus of comparative literature and philosophy by courtesy at Stanford University.

Partial bibliography

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. ISBN 0691020167
Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. ISBN 0816610649
Philosophy in History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. (co-editor)
Contingency, Irony, Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ISBN 0521367816
Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ISBN 0521358779
Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ISBN 0521358787
Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. ISBN 0674003128
Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ISBN 0521556864
Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin, 2000. ISBN 0140262881
The Future of Religion with Gianni Vattimo. Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2005. ISBN 0231134940

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