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Rorty, Richard McKay (1931–2007)

DOI
10.4324/9780415249126-P056-1
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DOI: 10.4324/9780415249126-P056-1
Version: v1,  Published online: 1998
Retrieved March 28, 2024, from https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/biographical/rorty-richard-mckay-1931-2007/v-1

1. Life

Rorty’s philosophical training at the University of Chicago and Yale University grounded him in the history of philosophy and the main currents of pragmatism and traditional philosophy dominant in the USA in the first half of the twentieth century, as well as the techniques and goals of the analytical philosophy then winning the allegiance of younger philosophers. Starting in the 1960s, he published articles and reviews addressing a wide range of philosophical subjects, the philosophies of thinkers as disparate as Whitehead, Dewey, Royce, Austin and Wilfrid Sellars, and, always, the metaphilosophical issues that arise from the multiplicity of conceptions of philosophy and its methods. He surveyed these metaphilosophical issues from a pragmatist point of view in the introduction to his anthology The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method (1967). During the later 1960s and the 1970s he won wide recognition as a leading contributor to debates in the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, epistemology and the philosophy of language, staking out radical positions in each of these fields and drawing on the attacks on the philosophical tradition in Heidegger, Derrida, the later Wittgenstein and especially Dewey. He reached the first rank of US philosophers and won international attention outside philosophical circles with the publication of his major work Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). This book brought together all his lines of thought in an attempt to get philosophers, and those who look to philosophy to lend authority to their own cultural activity, to abandon the views of knowledge, mind, language and culture which give appeal to movements like analytic philosophy that claim to put philosophy on the true path of a science. Since then he has, in many articles, reviews and lectures, extended his attack on that philosophical tradition. He has defended his version of pragmatism as the best way of thinking about those things philosophers should still be thinking about; he has sought to place his thought in relation to an ever-widening range of other twentieth-century writers both within and outside philosophy (for example, Castoriadis, Davidson, Dennett, Foucault, Freud, Habermas, Lyotard, Nabokov, Orwell, Putnam and Roberto Unger) and to make pragmatism useful to workers in other areas (for example, feminism, education, jurisprudence and literary criticism). And he has taken up the role, well-established in Europe but rare among philosophers in the United States after Dewey’s death, of a public intellectual, commenting in articles and interviews in journals of general circulation on affairs of common interest in democratic societies. Rorty’s wide command of modern philosophy is remarkable, as is his dialogue with a broad spectrum of philosophical movements, and he is unusual also in giving credit to a number of other thinkers (Dewey, Heidegger, Davidson, Freud, Kuhn, Dennett, Quine, Sellars, Derrida, Nietzsche) for most of the key ideas in his writings. (Dennett, however, has enunciated the Rorty Factor: ‘Take whatever Rorty says about anyone’s views and multiply it by. 742’ to derive what they actually said.) Many of his most important papers and lectures have been collected in four volumes (listed below). Having urged a break with the traditional project of philosophy, he left the philosophy department at Princeton University to become a professor of humanities at the University of Virginia in 1982.

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Citing this article:
Rohr, Michael David and Christopher Voparil. Life. Rorty, Richard McKay (1931–2007), 1998, doi:10.4324/9780415249126-P056-1. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Taylor and Francis, https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/biographical/rorty-richard-mckay-1931-2007/v-1/sections/life-28157.
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