Richard Rorty

Richard McKay Rorty (October 4, 1931 – June 8, 2007) was an American philosopher, historian of ideas, and public intellectual. Educated at the University of Chicago and Yale University, Rorty's academic career included appointments as the Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, the Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia, and as a professor of comparative literature at Stanford University. Among his most influential books are '' Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature'' (1979), ''Consequences of Pragmatism'' (1982), and '' Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity'' (1989).

Rorty rejected the long-held idea that correct internal representations of objects in the outside world are a necessary prerequisite for knowledge. Rorty argued instead that knowledge is an ''internal'' and ''linguistic'' affair; knowledge relates only to our own language. Rorty argues that language is made up of vocabularies that are temporary and historical, and concludes that "since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths". The acceptance of the preceding arguments leads to what Rorty calls " ironism"; a state of mind where people are completely aware that their knowledge is dependent on their time and place in history, and are therefore somewhat detached from their own beliefs. However, Rorty also argues that "a belief can still regulate action, can still be thought worth dying for, among people who are quite aware that this belief is caused by nothing deeper than contingent historical circumstance".

Biography

Richard Rorty was born on October 4, 1931, in New York City. His parents, James and Winifred Rorty, were activists, writers and social democrats. His maternal grandfather, Walter Rauschenbusch, was a central figure in the Social Gospel movement of the early 20th century.

His father experienced two nervous breakdowns in his later life. The second breakdown, which he had in the early 1960s, was more serious and "included claims to divine prescience."Bruce Kuklick. "Neil Gross, Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher." ''Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society'' 47.1 (2011):36. Consequently, Richard Rorty fell into depression as a teenager and in 1962 began a six-year psychiatric analysis for obsessional neurosis. Rorty wrote about the beauty of rural New Jersey orchids in his short autobiography, "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids," and his desire to combine aesthetic beauty and social justice. His colleague Jürgen Habermas's obituary for Rorty points out that Rorty's childhood experiences led him to a vision of philosophy as the reconciliation of "the celestial beauty of orchids with Trotsky's dream of justice on earth." Habermas describes Rorty as an ironist:

Nothing is sacred to Rorty the ironist. Asked at the end of his life about the "holy", the strict atheist answered with words reminiscent of the young Hegel: "My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law."

Rorty enrolled at the University of Chicago shortly before turning 15, where he received a bachelor's and a master's degree in philosophy (studying under Richard McKeon), continuing at Yale University for a PhD in philosophy (1952–1956)."Richard Rorty, distinguished public intellectual and controversial philosopher, dead at 75"
(Stanford's announcement), June 10, 2007 He married another academic, Amélie Oksenberg (Harvard University professor), with whom he had a son, Jay Rorty, in 1954. After two years in the U.S. Army, he taught at Wellesley College for three years until 1961. Rorty divorced his wife and then married Stanford University bioethicist Mary Varney in 1972. They had two children, Kevin and Patricia, now Max. While Richard Rorty was a "strict atheist" (Habermas), Mary Varney Rorty was a practicing Mormon.

Rorty was a professor of philosophy at Princeton University for 21 years. In 1981, he was a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, commonly known as the "Genius Grant", in its first year of awarding, and in 1982 he became Kenan Professor of the Humanities at the University of Virginia, working closely with colleagues and students in multiple departments, especially in English."Richard Rorty, Philosopher, Dies at 75"
(NY Times Obituary), June 11, 2007 In 1998 Rorty became professor of comparative literature (and philosophy, by courtesy), at Stanford University, where he spent the remainder of his academic career. During this period he was especially popular, and once quipped that he had been assigned to the position of "transitory professor of trendy studies."

Rorty's doctoral dissertation, ''The Concept of Potentiality'' was a historical study of the concept, completed under the supervision of Paul Weiss, but his first book (as editor), ''The Linguistic Turn'' (1967), was firmly in the prevailing analytic mode, collecting classic essays on the linguistic turn in analytic philosophy. 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 Willard Van Orman 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 the meaning of a proposition is determined by its use in linguistic practice. 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. Rorty wrote in ''Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity'' (1989):

Truth cannot be out there—cannot exist independently of the human mind—because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own unaided by the describing activities of humans cannot. (p. 5)

Views like this led Rorty to question many of philosophy's most basic assumptions—and also led to his being apprehended as a postmodern/deconstructionist philosopher. Indeed, from the late 1980s through the 1990s, Rorty focused on the continental philosophical tradition, examining the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida. His work from this period includes ''Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity'' (1989), ''Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers'' ''II'' (1991), and ''Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers III'' (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.

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 such philosophy, in the process of finding reasons for putting those pretensions and puzzles aside, helped earn itself an important place in the history of ideas. By giving up on the quest for apodicticity and finality that Edmund Husserl shared with Rudolf Carnap and Bertrand Russell, and by finding new reasons for thinking that such quest will never succeed, analytic philosophy 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 his writings, including '' Philosophy as Cultural Politics (Philosophical Papers IV), and'' '' Achieving Our Country'' (1998), a political manifesto partly based on readings of Dewey and Walt Whitman in which he defended the idea of a progressive, pragmatic left against what he felt were defeatist, anti-liberal, anti-humanist positions espoused by the critical left and continental school. Rorty felt these anti-humanist positions were personified by figures like Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault. Such theorists were also guilty of an "inverted Platonism" in which they attempted to craft overarching, metaphysical, "sublime" philosophies—which in fact contradicted their core claims to be ironist and contingent.

According to Eduardo Mendieta "Rorty described himself as a 'postmodern bourgeois liberal', even if he also attacked the academic left, though not for being anti-truth, but for being unpatriotic. Rorty’s Zen attitude about truth could easily be confused for a form of political relativism—a Machiavellian type of politics."

Rorty's last works, after his move to Stanford University concerned the place of religion in contemporary life, liberal communities, comparative literature and philosophy as "cultural politics."

Shortly before his death, he wrote a piece called "The Fire of Life" (published in the November 2007 issue of ''Poetry'' magazine) in which he meditates on his diagnosis and the comfort of poetry. He concludes:

I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts—just as I would have if I had made more close friends. Cultures with richer vocabularies are more fully human—farther removed from the beasts—than those with poorer ones; individual men and women are more fully human when their memories are amply stocked with verses.

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

Major works

''Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature''

In ''Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature'' (1979), Rorty argues that contemporary analytic philosophy is overly concerned with trying to discover capital-T, objective Truth due to a particular self-image it has inherited from Descartes, Locke, and Kant, namely the image of philosophy as trying to discover how exactly the mind mirrors or represents a mind-independent reality. He argues that if we abandon this image, philosophy loses its foundational status and its ability to ground all other forms of knowledge, instead becoming a form of literature or cultural criticism.

The Cartesian-Lockean-Kantian paradigm (what Rorty calls "representationalism") states, in brief, that knowledge is the result of the mind accurately mirroring an objective, mind-independent reality, and a statement is true if it accurately describes a state of affairs in the mind-independent reality. In other words, knowledge and truth on this paradigm are bound up with a dualistic image of mind and world, subject and object, etc. The difference between genuine knowledge and mere opinion or between true and false statements is that the former are objective (they line up with the mind-independent, privileged realm of objectivity), whereas the latter are subjective (they are bound up with subjective values rooted in individual minds).

Rorty uses the arguments of Quine, Sellars, and Donald Davidson to argue that representationalism is untenable.

Quine's critique of the analytic–synthetic distinction undermines the rationalist idea that meanings are fixed or innate, instead suggesting that meanings are part of a holistic web of belief continually subject to revision, meaning that privileged representations cannot be obtained by appealing to logical or definitional truths within language.

Sellars's critique of the Myth of the Given undermines the empiricist idea that experiential knowledge is simply "given" to someone merely by having an experience, instead suggesting that knowledge is a normative and linguistic affair which takes place in the "logical space of reasons", meaning that privileged representations cannot be obtained by appealing to an indubitable bedrock of experience.

Each one attacks only one side of the representationalist coin (rationalism for Quine and empiricism for Sellars) and continues where the other left off, but combining them brings down the entire paradigm, and this is essentially what Davidson's critique of scheme–content dualism does. Davidson argues that no sense can be made of a conceptual scheme that makes sense of empirical content, as well as the related ideas of conceptual relativism and incommensurability. Scheme–content dualism is the root of the representationalist dualisms between mind and world, subject and object, etc., and so Davidson's critique serves as a knockdown argument against the entire paradigm.

With representationalism rendered unintelligible, we have instead only truth defined as beliefs that pay their way, i.e. a pragmatic conception of truth. The only worthwhile description of the actual process of inquiry, Rorty claims, is a Kuhnian account of the standard phases of the progress of disciplines, oscillating through normal and abnormal periods, between routine problem solving and intellectual crises. Knowledge and truth become communal, conversational affairs where communities simply try out different ways of speaking to find the most useful, rather than objective, one, meaning that what is considered rational at a given time is necessarily bound up with historical contingencies. It is the preoccupation with trying to get at what actually exists beyond the mind, rather than simply what works, that Rorty believes has caused analytic philosophers to continue working on unsolvable problems rather than just switch their vocabularies and move on.

After rejecting representationalism, Rorty argues that one of the few roles 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. He introduces a distinction between systematic and edifying philosophy; systematic philosophers construct grand systems in an attempt to flesh out a general account of representation, hoping that this will solve all of the traditional problems by making the relation between mind and world clearer, whereas edifying philosophers reject the need to confront philosophical problems on their own terms, choosing instead to expose their origins in historically contingent vocabularies, showing that a problem dissolves if we simply switch to a different, more useful vocabulary. Rorty suggests that each generation tries to subject all disciplines to the model that the most successful discipline of the day employs. In Rorty's view, the success of modern science has led academics in philosophy and the humanities to mistakenly imitate scientific methods.

''Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity''

In ''Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity'' (1989), Rorty argues that there is no worthwhile theory of truth, aside from the non-epistemic semantic theory Davidson developed (based on the work of Alfred Tarski). Rorty also suggests that there are two kinds of philosophers: those occupied with ''private'' matters and those occupied with ''public'' matters. Private philosophers, who provide one with greater abilities to (re)create oneself (a view adapted from Nietzsche, and which Rorty identifies with the novels of Marcel Proust and Vladimir Nabokov), should not be expected to help with public problems. For a public philosophy, one might instead turn to philosophers like Rawls or Habermas, even though, according to Rorty, the latter is a "liberal who doesn't want to be an ironist". While Habermas believes that his '' theory of communicative rationality'' constitutes an update of rationalism, Rorty thinks that the latter and any "universal" pretensions should be totally abandoned.

This book also marks his first attempt to specifically articulate a political vision consistent 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." Consistent with his anti-foundationalism, Rorty states that there is "no noncircular theoretical backup for the belief that cruelty is horrible."

Rorty also introduces the terminology of ironism, which he uses to describe his mindset and his philosophy. Rorty describes the ironist as a person who "worries that the process of socialization which turned her into a human being by giving her a language may have given her the wrong language, and so turned her into the wrong kind of human being. But she cannot give a criterion of wrongness."

''Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth''

Rorty describes the project of this essay collection as trying to "offer an antirepresentationalist account of the relation between natural science and the rest of culture." 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. Rorty argues that liberalism can "get along without philosophical presuppositions," while at the same time conceding to communitarians that "a conception of the self that makes the community constitutive of the self does comport well with liberal democracy." Moreover, for Rorty Rawls could be compared to Habermas, a sort of United States' Habermas, with E. Mendieta's words: "An Enlightenment figure who thought that all we have is communicative reason and the use of public reason, two different names for the same thing—the use of reason by a public for the purpose of deciding how to live collectively and what aims should be the goal of the public good".
For Rorty, social institutions ought to be thought of as "experiments in cooperation rather than as attempts to embody a universal and ahistorical order."

''Essays on Heidegger and Others''

In this text, Rorty focuses primarily on the continental philosophers Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. He argues that these European "post-Nietzscheans" share much with American pragmatists, in that they critique metaphysics and reject the correspondence theory of truth. Taking up and developing what he had argued in previous works, Rorty claims that Derrida is most useful when viewed as a funny writer who attempted to circumvent the Western philosophical tradition, rather than the inventor of a philosophical (or literary) "method". In this vein, Rorty criticizes Derrida's followers like Paul de Man for taking deconstructive literary theory too seriously.

''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 cultural Left and a progressive Left. He criticizes the cultural Left, which is exemplified by post-structuralists such as Foucault and postmodernists such as Lyotard, for offering critiques of society, but no alternatives (or alternatives that are so vague and general as to be abdications). Although these intellectuals make insightful claims about the ills of society, Rorty suggests that they provide no alternatives and even occasionally deny the possibility of progress. On the other hand, the progressive Left, exemplified for Rorty by the pragmatist John Dewey, Whitman and James Baldwin, makes hope for a better future its priority. Without hope, Rorty argues, change is spiritually inconceivable and the cultural Left has begun to breed cynicism. Rorty sees the progressive Left as acting in the philosophical spirit of pragmatism. The book's passage about of the rise of an authoritarian "strongman" who will ensure that the "smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots" has been described as prophetic of Donald Trump's rise to political power.

On human rights

Rorty's notion of human rights is grounded on the notion of sentimentality. He contended that throughout history humans have devised various means of construing certain groups of individuals as inhuman or subhuman. Thinking in rationalist (foundationalist) terms will not solve this problem, he claimed. Rorty advocated the creation of a culture of global human rights in order to stop violations from happening through a sentimental education. He argued that we should create a sense of empathy or teach empathy to others so as to understand others' suffering.

On hope

Rorty advocates for what philosopher Nick Gall characterizes as a "boundless hope" or type of "melancholic meliorism." According to this view, Rorty replaces foundationalist hopes for certainty with those of perpetual growth and constant change, which he believes enables us to send conversation and hopes in new directions we currently can't imagine.

Rorty articulates this boundless hope in his 1982 book ''Consequences of Pragmatism,'' where he applies his framework of wholesale hope versus retail hope. Herein he says, "Let me sum up by offering a third and final characterization of pragmatism: It is the doctrine that there are no constraints on inquiry save conversational ones—no wholesale constraints derived from the nature of the objects, or of the mind, or of language, but only those retail constraints provided by the remarks of our fellow inquirers."

Reception and criticism

Rorty is among the most widely discussed and controversial contemporary philosophers, and his works have provoked thoughtful responses from many other well-respected figures in the field. In Robert Brandom's anthology ''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. In 2007, Roger Scruton wrote, "Rorty was paramount among those thinkers who advance their own opinion as immune to criticism, by pretending that it is not truth but consensus that counts, while defining the consensus in terms of people like themselves." Ralph Marvin Tumaob concludes that Rorty was influenced by Jean-François Lyotard's metanarratives, and added that "postmodernism was influenced further by the works of Rorty".

McDowell is strongly influenced by Rorty, particularly ''Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature'' (1979). In continental philosophy, authors such as Jürgen Habermas, Gianni Vattimo, Jacques Derrida, Albrecht Wellmer, Hans Joas, Chantal Mouffe, Simon Critchley, Esa Saarinen, and Mike Sandbothe are influenced in different ways by Rorty's thinking. American novelist David Foster Wallace titled a short story in his collection '' Oblivion: Stories'' "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature," and critics have identified Rorty's influence in some of Wallace's writings on irony.

Susan Haack has been a fierce critic of Rorty's neopragmatism. Haack criticises Rorty's claim to be a pragmatist at all and wrote a short play called ''We Pragmatists'', where Rorty and Charles Sanders Peirce have a fictional conversation using only accurate quotes from their own writing. For Haack, the only link between Rorty's neopragmatism and Peirce's pragmatism is the name. Haack believes Rorty's neopragmatism is anti-philosophical and anti-intellectual, and exposes people further to rhetorical manipulation.

Although Rorty was an avowed liberal, his political and moral philosophies have been attacked by commentators from the Left, some of whom believe them to be insufficient frameworks for social justice. Rorty was also criticized for his rejection of the idea that science can depict the world. One criticism, especially of ''Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity'', is that Rorty's philosophical hero, the ironist, is an elitist figure. Rorty argues that most people would be "commonsensically nominalist and historicist" but not ironist. They would combine an ongoing attention to the particular as opposed to the transcendent (nominalism) with an awareness of their place in a continuum of contingent lived experience alongside other individuals ( historicist), without necessarily having continual doubts about the resulting worldview as the ironist does. An ironist is someone who "has radical and continuing doubts about their final vocabulary", that is "a set of words which they umansemploy to justify their actions, their beliefs, and their lives"; "realizes that argument phrased in their vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts"; and "does not think their vocabulary is closer to reality than others". On the other hand, the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo and the Spanish philosopher Santiago Zabala in their 2011 book '' Hermeneutic Communism: from Heidegger to Marx'' affirm that

together with Richard Rorty we also consider it a flaw that "the main thing contemporary academic Marxists inherit from Marx and Engels is the conviction that the quest for the cooperative commonwealth should be scientific rather than utopian, knowing rather than romantic." As we will show hermeneutics contains all the utopian and romantic features that Rorty refers to because, contrary to the knowledge of science, it does not claim modern universality but rather postmodern particularism.

Rorty often draws on a broad range of other philosophers to support his views, and his interpretation of their work has been contested. Since he is working from a tradition of reinterpretation, he is not interested in "accurately" portraying other thinkers, but rather in using it 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. In ''Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity'', Rorty attempts to disarm those who criticize his writings by arguing that their philosophical criticisms are made using axioms that are explicitly rejected within Rorty's own philosophy. For instance, he defines allegations of irrationality as affirmations of vernacular "otherness", and so—Rorty argues—accusations of irrationality can be expected during ''any'' argument and must simply be brushed aside.

Awards and honors

*1973: Guggenheim Fellowship
*1981: MacArthur Fellowship
*1983: Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
*2005: Elected to the American Philosophical Society
*2007: The Thomas Jefferson Medal, awarded by the American Philosophical Society

Select bibliography

;As author
* '' Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature''. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.
* ''Consequences of Pragmatism''. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982.
* '' Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
* ''Philosophical Papers'' vols. I–IV:
** ''Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers I''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
** ''Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers II''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
** ''Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers III''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
** '' Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers IV''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
* ''Mind, Language, and Metaphilosophy: Early Philosophical Papers'' Eds. S. Leach and J. Tartaglia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. .
* '' Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America''. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
* '' Philosophy and Social Hope''. New York: Penguin, 2000.
* ''Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies: A Conversation with Richard Rorty''. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2002.
* ''The Future of Religion'' with Gianni Vattimo Ed. Santiago Zabala. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
* ''An Ethics for Today: Finding Common Ground Between Philosophy and Religion''. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
* ''What's the Use of Truth?'' with Pascal Engel, transl. by William McCuaig, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007
*''On Philosophy and Philosophers: Unpublished papers 1960-2000'', Ed. by W. P. Małecki and Chris Voparil, Cambridge University Press 2020
* ''Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism'', Ed. E. Mendieta, foreword by Robert B. Brandom, Harvard UP 2021,
*''What Can We Hope For? Essays on Politics'', Ed. by W. P. Małecki and Chris Voparil, Princeton University Press 2022

;As editor
* ''The Linguistic Turn, Essays in Philosophical Method'', (1967), edited by Richard M. Rorty, University of Chicago Press, 1992, (an introduction and two retrospective essays)
* ''Philosophy in History''. edited by Richard M. Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985 (an essay by Richard M. Rorty, "Historiography of Philosophy", pp. 29–76)

See also

* Instrumentalism
* List of American philosophers
* List of liberal theorists
* List of thinkers influenced by deconstruction

Notes

Further reading

* Chris Voparil,
Reconstructing Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Classical Pragmatists
', 2022
* David Rondel, ed.,
The Cambridge Companion to Rorty
'' 2021
* Randall Auxier, Eli Kramer, Krzysztof Piotr Skowroński, eds.,
Rorty and Beyond
', 2019
* Ulf Schulenberg, ''Romanticism and Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Idea of a Poeticized Culture'', 2015
* Krzysztof Piotr Skowroński,
Values, Valuations, and Axiological Norms in Richard Rorty's Neopragmatism
', 2015
* Marianne Janack,
What We Mean By Experience
', 2012
* Marianne Janack, editor,
Feminist Interpretations of Richard Rorty
', 2010
* James Tartaglia, ''Richard Rorty: Critical Assessments'', 4 vols., 2009
* Neil Gross, ''Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher'', 2008
*Gross, Neil. 2019. ''Richard Rorty: the Making of an American Philosopher.'' University of Chicago Press.
* ''Rorty's Politics of Redescription'' / Gideon Calder, 2007
* ''Rorty and the Mirror of Nature'' / James Tartaglia, 2007
* ''Richard Rorty: Pragmatism and Political Liberalism'' / Michael Bacon, 2007
* ''Richard Rorty: politics and vision'' / Christopher Voparil, 2006
* ''Richard Rorty: his philosophy under discussion'' / Andreas Vieth, 2005
* ''Richard Rorty'' / Charles B Guignon., 2003
* ''Rorty'' / Gideon Calder, 2003
* ''Richard Rorty's American faith'' / Taub, Gad Shmuel, 2003
* ''The ethical ironist: Kierkegaard, Rorty, and the educational quest'' / Rohrer, Patricia Jean, 2003
* ''Doing philosophy as a way to individuation: Reading Rorty and Cavell'' / Kwak, Duck-Joo, 2003
* ''Richard Rorty'' / Alan R Malachowski, 2002
* ''Richard Rorty: critical dialogues'' / Matthew Festenstein, 2001
* ''Richard Rorty: education, philosophy, and politics'' / Michael Peters, 2001
* ''Rorty and his critics'' / Robert Brandom, 2000
* ''On Rorty'' / Richard Rumana, 2000
* ''Philosophy and freedom: Derrida, Rorty, Habermas, Foucault'' / John McCumber, 2000
* ''A pragmatist's progress?: Richard Rorty and American intellectual history'' / John Pettegrew, 2000
* ''Problems of the modern self: Reflections on Rorty, Taylor, Nietzsche, and Foucault'' / Dudrick, David Francis, 2000
* ''The last conceptual revolution: a critique of Richard Rorty's political philosophy'' / Eric Gander, 1999
* ''Richard Rorty's politics: liberalism at the end of the American century'' / Markar Melkonian, 1999
* ''The work of friendship: Rorty, his critics, and the project of solidarity'' / Dianne Rothleder, 1999
* ''For the love of perfection: Richard Rorty and liberal education'' / René Vincente Arcilla, 1995
* ''Rorty & pragmatism: the philosopher responds to his critics'' / Herman J Saatkamp, 1995
* ''Richard Rorty: prophet and poet of the new pragmatism'' / David L Hall, 1994
* ''Reading Rorty: critical responses to Philosophy and the mirror of nature (and beyond)'' / Alan R Malachowski, 1990
* ''Rorty's humanistic pragmatism: philosophy democratized'' / Konstantin Kolenda, 1990

External links

*
*

UCIspace @ the Libraries digital collection: Richard Rorty born digital files, 1988–2003

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry


"Dewey and Posner on Pragmatism and Moral Progress," University of Chicago Law School, April 14, 2006.

PhilWeb's entry for Richard Rorty
An exhaustive compilation of on-line links and off-line sources.

Rorty essays
published in ''Dissent'' (magazine)

Rorty audio
informative interview by Prof. Robert P. Harrison, Nov. 22, 2005.

Rorty interview
"Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies," conducted by Derek Nystrom & Kent Puckett, Prickly Paradigm Press, Sept. 1998.


''The Atlantic Monthly'', April 23, 1998.

Rorty Memorial Lecture
by Jürgen Habermas, Stanford University, Nov. 2, 2007.

Rorty eulogized
by Richard Posner, Brian Eno, Mark Edmundson, Jürgen Habermas, Daniel Dennett, Stanley Fish, David Bromwich, Simon Blackburn, Morris Dickstein & others, ''Slate Magazine'', June 18, 2007.

"The Inspiring Power of the Shy Thinker: Richard Rorty"
by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, ''Telos'', June 13, 2007.

Richard Rorty at Princeton: Personal Recollections
by Raymond Geuss in Arion, Winter 2008

Rereading Rorty
by Albrecht Wellmer in ''Krisis'', 2008.
*

{{DEFAULTSORT:Rorty, Richard
1931 births
2007 deaths
20th-century American non-fiction writers
20th-century American philosophers
21st-century American non-fiction writers
21st-century American philosophers
21st-century American writers
American atheists
American epistemologists
American metaphysicians
American people of German descent
American people of Irish descent
American philosophers of culture
American philosophers of education
American philosophers of language
American philosophers of mind
American philosophers of science
American social democrats
Deaths from pancreatic cancer in California
Heidegger scholars
Hermeneutists
Humor researchers
Irony theorists
MacArthur Fellows
Members of the American Philosophical Society
Metaphilosophers
Military personnel from New York City
Military personnel from New York (state)
Ontologists
People with obsessive–compulsive disorder
Philosophers of history
Philosophers of literature
Pragmatists
Princeton University faculty
United States Army soldiers
University of Chicago alumni
Wellesley College faculty
Wittgensteinian philosophers