Richard Rorty

1931-2007 · American · Pragmatism, Anti-representationalist Epistemology, Liberal Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Language

I have spent 40 years looking for a coherent and convincing way of formulating my worries about what, if anything, philosophy is good for.

Richard Rorty entered the University of Chicago at fifteen, grandson of Social Gospel theologian Walter Rauschenbusch and son of a left-wing journalist. He built an early reputation as an analytic philosopher of mind, then in 1979 published Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and broke with everything he had been doing. The book argued that Western philosophy since Descartes had been gripped by one bad picture: the mind as a mirror reflecting reality, philosophy as the discipline that polishes the glass. Drawing on Sellars, Quine, Wittgenstein, and Davidson, he dissolved rather than refuted…

Topics Richard Rorty addresses

• anti-representationalism
• the mirror of nature
• philosophy as cultural politics
• edifying versus systematic philosophy
• liberal ironism
• the contingency of language
• the contingency of selfhood
• the contingency of liberal community
• final vocabulary
• redescription
• the private/public split
• cruelty as the worst thing we do
• solidarity without metaphysical grounding
• the priority of democracy to philosophy
• ethnocentrism and anti-anti-ethnocentrism
• truth without correspondence
• justification to one's peers
• the myth of the given
• the scheme/content distinction
• the dogmas of empiricism
• eliminative materialism
• the linguistic turn
• strong textualism
• sentimental education and moral progress

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