1931-2007
Richard Rorty was at his death a professor of comparative literature and philosophy at Stanford University and one of the most influential and controversial American philosophers of the twentieth century. He crafted a unique version of pragmatism from a blend of Anglo-American analytic philosophy with the Continental tradition, and his impact was felt across a broad range of the humanities and social sciences, including philosophy, literature, political science, and the fine arts.
Rorty was the grandson of Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918), a founder of the Social Gospel movement. Though he began his career in academic philosophy, Rorty later emerged as a social critic and political theorist of the first rank, connecting his earlier interest in epistemology with a critique of the foundations of twentieth- century liberalism. His early work in philosophy was limited to the Anglo-American tradition, but in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) he connected the radical implications of the doctrines of Wilfrid Sellars (1912-1989), W. V O. Quine (1908-2000), and Donald Davidson (1917-2003) with the insights of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), John Dewey (1859-1952), and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976).
Rorty’s main target, in both epistemology and political philosophy, was the hegemony of the paradigm of "representation" that had been in ascendance since the time of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). According to Rorty, this tradition privileged a conception of truth that sought to bring the objects "out there" in the world into correspondence with the representations "inside" our heads. This led philosophers into a misguided search for ways of purifying representations (hence the analytic tradition’s emphasis on clarifying linguistic propositions); however, instead of searching for a "final vocabulary" that could somehow bring the world and our representations into complete correspondence, philosophers should have taken up the more mundane tasks issuing from the pragmatism of John Dewey. Since philosophy and language are tools, not objective measuring sticks for determining truth, philosophers should avoid questions of validity, opt for an ironic detachment toward their own pronouncements, and reorient their discipline as therapeutic storytelling rather than rational adjudication.
Rorty’s pragmatism and antifoundationalism were disturbing to both sides of the political spectrum. To the Right he represented the worst of liberal relativism, and to the Left his "liberal ironist" pose seemed to justify political quiescence. From Rorty’s standpoint both sides mistake the issue—we need neither ontological foundations to justify our political stances, nor a fixed vocabulary to inspire us to political action. In any event, Rorty argued, rationality and foundationalist claims to knowledge are never the effective agents in history, since contending ontological positions (say between a Thomist and a Kantian liberal) are not themselves capable of rational resolution—it is in the "sad, sentimental" stories that we tell to one another that ultimate hope for the elimination of cruelty is to be found. This shift in the self-understanding of philosophy is Rorty’s most lasting contribution to the Anglo-American philosophic tradition, and while his idea of philosophy is not universally accepted, it is almost always the one proffered by his opponents as the relevant position to be refuted.
