Richard Rorty

Richard McKay Rorty
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophers
School	Pragmatism, Postanalytic
Main interests	Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mind, Ethics, Meta-epistemology, Liberalism
Notable ideas	Postphilosophy, Ironism, Final vocabulary, Epistemological Behaviorism

Richard McKay Rorty (October 4, 1931 in New York City – June 8, 2007) was an American philosopher. Rorty's long and diverse career saw him working in Philosophy, Humanities, and Literature departments. His complex intellectual background gave him a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the analytical tradition he would later famously reject.

Biography

Richard Rorty was born on October 4, 1931 to James and Winifred Rorty. Winifred was the daughter of Social Gospel theologian Walter Rauschenbusch. Rorty enrolled at the University of Chicago shortly before turning 15, where he received a bachelor's and a master's degree in philosophy, and continued at Yale University for a PhD in philosophy where 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, which were reflected in his next book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979).

Pragmatists generally hold that a proposition is true if believing it 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 combined pragmatism about truth and other matters with a later 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 allowed him to question many of philosophy's most basic assumptions.

By 1982, Rorty had become frustrated by the narrowness of philosophy departments, and consequently became a professor of humanities at the University of Virginia.

In the late 1980s through the 1990s, Rorty focused on the continental philosophical tradition, examining the work of Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. His work from this period included Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers (1991) and Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers (1998). The latter two works attempt to bridge the dichotomy between analytic and continental philosophy by claiming that the two traditions complement rather than oppose each other.

In 1998, Rorty joined the comparative literature department at Stanford.

According to Rorty, 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 past scientism, just as the German idealists cleared a path that led around empiricism.

In the last fifteen years of his life, Rorty continued to publish voluminously, including four volumes of philosophical papers; Achieving Our Country (1998), a political manifesto partly based on readings of John Dewey and Walt Whitman in which he defended the idea of a progressive, pragmatic left against what he feels are defeatist 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. His last works focused on the place of religion in contemporary life and philosophy as "cultural politics".

Having held teaching positions at Wellesley College, Princeton University, and the University of Virginia, Rorty lived out his last years as professor emeritus of comparative literature and philosophy, by courtesy, at Stanford University.

On June 8, 2007, Rorty died in his home of pancreatic cancer.

Major works

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

Main article: Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Rorty argues that epistemology rests on the view that the main function of the mind is to faithfully represent a mind-independent external reality. Rorty claims that this view is false, and hence the entire enterprise of foundationalist epistemology is misguided. A foundationalist believes that in order to avoid the regress inherent in claiming that all beliefs are justified by other beliefs, some beliefs must be self-justifying and form the foundations to all knowledge. There were two senses of "foundationalism" criticized in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. In the philosophical sense, Rorty criticized the attempt to justify knowledge claims by tracing them to a set of foundations; more broadly, he criticized the claim of philosophy to function foundationally within a culture. The former argument draws on Sellars's critique of the idea that there is a "given" in sensory perception, in combination with Quine's critique of the distinction between analytic sentences (sentences which are true solely in virtue of what they mean) and synthetic sentences (sentences made true by the world). Each critique, taken alone, provides a problem for a conception of how philosophy ought to proceed. Combined, Rorty claimed, the two critiques are devastating. With no privileged insight into the structure of belief and no privileged realm of truths of meaning, we have, instead, knowledge as those beliefs that pay their way. The only worthwhile description of the actual process of enquiry, Rorty claimed, was a Kuhnian account of the standard phases of the progress of discipline, oscillating through normal and abnormal science, between routine problem solving and intellectual crises. The only role left for a philosopher is to act as an intellectual gadfly, attempting to induce a revolutionary break with previous practice, a role that Rorty was happy to take on himself. Rorty claims that each generation tries 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. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature popularized and extended ideas of Wilfrid Sellars (the critique of the Myth of the given) and W. V. O. Quine (the critique of the analytic-synthetic distinction) and others who advocate the doctrine of "dissolving" rather than solving philosophical problems.

Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

Main article: Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), 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 intelligible truth (at least not in the sense in which it is conventionally conceptualized). Rorty proposes that philosophy (along with art, science, etc.) can and should be used to provide one with the ability to (re)create oneself, a view adapted from Nietzsche and which Rorty also identifies with the novels of Proust, Nabokov, 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.

Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth

Amongst the essays in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1 (1990), is "The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy," in which Rorty defends Rawls against communitarian critics and argues that personal ideals of perfection and standards of truth were no more needed in politics than a state religion. He sees Rawls' concept of reflective equilibrium as a more appropriate way of approaching political decision-making in modern liberal democracies.

Achieving Our Country

Main article: Achieving Our Country

In Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (1998), Rorty differentiates between what he sees as the two sides of the Left, a critical Left and a progressive Left. He criticizes the critical Left, which is exemplified by post-structuralists such as Michel Foucault and postmodernists such as Jean-François Lyotard. Although these intellectuals make insightful claims about the ills of society, Rorty holds that they provide no alternatives and even present progress as problematic at times. On the other hand, the progressive Left, exemplified for Rorty by John Dewey, makes progress its priority in its goal of "achieving our country." Rorty sees the progressive Left as acting in the philosophical spirit of pragmatism.

Reception and criticism

While controversial, Rorty's works have provoked thoughtful responses from some of the most well-respected philosophers of his age. In Brandom's anthology, entitled Rorty and His Critics, for example, Rorty's philosophy is discussed by Donald Davidson, Jürgen Habermas, Hilary Putnam, John McDowell, Jacques Bouveresse, and Daniel Dennett, among others.

His political and moral philosophies have been attacked from the Right, who call them relativist, nihilistic, and irresponsible, and the Left, who believe them to be insufficient frameworks for social justice. Rorty was also criticized by others as failing to recognize the ability of science to depict the world. In Daniel Dennett's humorous Philosophical Lexicon, 'Rorty' is defined as 'incorrigible', which sums up both Rorty's career and much of the philosophic community's reaction to it.

John McDowell is strongly influenced by Rorty, in particular Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). In the preface to Mind and World (pp. ix-x) McDowell states that "it will be obvious that Rorty's work is [...] central for the way I define my stance here".

One major criticism, especially of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is that Rorty's philosophical 'hero,' the ironist, is an elitist figure . Rorty claims that the majority of people would be "commensensically nominalist and historicist" but not ironist.

Rorty often draws on a broad range of other philosophers to support his views, and his interpretation of their works has been contested . Since Rorty is working from a tradition of re-interpretation, he remains uninterested in 'accurately' portraying other thinkers, but rather in utilizing their work in the same way a literary critic might use a novel. His essay "The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres" is a thorough description of how he treats the greats in the history of philosophy.

As detailed in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, many philosophical criticisms against Rorty are made using axioms that are explicitly rejected within Rorty's own philosophy. For instance, Rorty defines allegations of irrationality as affirmations of vernacular "otherness", and so accusations of irrationality are not only brushed aside, but are expected during any argument.

Select bibliography

• Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. ISBN
• Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. ISBN
• Philosophy in History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. (co-editor)
• Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ISBN
• Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ISBN
• Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ISBN
• Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. ISBN
• Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ISBN
• Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin, 2000. ISBN
• Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies: A Conversation with Richard Rorty. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2002. ISBN
• The Future of Religion with Gianni Vattimo; edited by Santiago Zabala. Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2005. ISBN
• Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers IV. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Critical assessments

• Malachowski, Alan (ed). Richard Rorty. Princeton University Press, 2002. ISBN 0691057087
• Owen, J. Judd. Religion and the Demise of Liberal Rationalism. Chapters 2-4. University of Chicago Press, 2001.
• Bacon, Michael. "A Defense of Liberal Ironism." Res Publica. 11.4 (2005): pp 403-423. <http://www.springerlink.com/content/h241j5mx845l726t/>
• Rolfe, Gary. "Judgements without rules: towards a postmodern ironist concept of research validity." Nursing Inquiry. 13.1 (2006): p 7-15. [2]
• Brandom, Robert (ed). Rorty and His Critics. Blackwell Publishing, Incorporated, 2000. ISBN 0631209824

See also

• Analytic philosophy
• Contributions to liberal theory
• Liberalism
• List of thinkers influenced by deconstruction
• Postanalytic philosophy
• Deconstruction-and-religion

External links

• Rorty's Homepage at Stanford
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry
• Recent Richard Rorty essays in Dissent (magazine)
• Dan Adleman's Obituary for Richard Rorty
• A copy of the introduction to Rorty's Consequences of Pragmatism
• Josefina Ayerza interviews Richard Rorty for Flash Art Magazine
• Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies: A Conversation with Richard Rorty, Derek Nystrom and Kent Puckett, Prickly Paradigm Press
• How Richard Rorty Found Religion in First Things
• Philosopher, poet and friend by Jürgen Habermas Habermas writes an obiturary for Richard Rorty published at signandsight.com, June 12, 2007

• A short film about Richard Rorty
• PhilWeb's entry for Richard Rorty An exhaustive compilation of on-line links and off-line sources.