36 Facts About Richard Rorty

1.

Richard Rorty rejected the long-held idea that correct internal representations of objects in the outside world is a necessary prerequisite for knowledge.

2.

Richard Rorty argued instead that knowledge is an internal and linguistic affair; knowledge only relates to our own language.

3.

Richard Rorty was born on October 4,1931, in New York City.

4.

Richard Rorty's maternal grandfather, Walter Rauschenbusch, was a central figure in the Social Gospel movement of the early 20th century.

5.

Richard Rorty's father experienced two nervous breakdowns in his later life.

6.

Richard 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.

7.

Richard Rorty married another academic, Amelie Oksenberg, with whom he had a son, Jay Rorty, in 1954.

8.

Richard Rorty divorced his wife and then married Stanford University bioethicist Mary Varney in 1972.

9.

Richard Rorty was a professor of philosophy at Princeton University for 21 years.

10.

In 1998 Richard Rorty became professor of comparative literature, at Stanford University, where he spent the remainder of his academic career.

11.

Richard 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, The Linguistic Turn, was firmly in the prevailing analytic mode, collecting classic essays on the linguistic turn in analytic philosophy.

12.

Richard 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.

13.

Indeed, from the late 1980s through the 1990s, Richard Rorty focused on the continental philosophical tradition, examining the works of Friederich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jacques Derrida.

14.

Richard Rorty felt these anti-humanist positions were personified by figures like Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault.

15.

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

16.

In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature Richard Rorty argues that the central problems of modern epistemology depend upon a picture of the mind as trying to faithfully represent a mind-independent, external reality.

17.

Richard Rorty however criticized both the idea that arguments can be based upon self-evident premises and the idea that arguments can be based upon noninferential sensations.

18.

The only worthwhile description of the actual process of inquiry, Richard Rorty claimed, was 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.

19.

Richard Rorty suggests that each generation tries to subject all disciplines to the model that the most successful discipline of the day employs.

20.

In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Richard Rorty argues that there is no worthwhile theory of truth, aside from the non-epistemic semantic theory Donald Davidson developed.

21.

Richard Rorty suggests that there are two kinds of philosophers; philosophers occupied with private or public matters.

22.

Richard Rorty introduces the terminology of ironism, which he uses to describe his mindset and his philosophy.

23.

Amongst the essays in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1, is "The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy," in which Richard Rorty defends Rawls against communitarian critics.

24.

Richard Rorty argues that these European "post-Nietzscheans" share much with American pragmatists, in that they critique metaphysics and reject the correspondence theory of truth.

25.

Richard Rorty 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.

26.

Richard Rorty sees the progressive Left as acting in the philosophical spirit of pragmatism.

27.

Richard Rorty contended that throughout history humans have devised various means of construing certain groups of individuals as inhuman or subhuman.

28.

Richard Rorty advocated the creation of a culture of global human rights in order to stop violations from happening through a sentimental education.

29.

Richard Rorty argued that we should create a sense of empathy or teach empathy to others so as to understand others' suffering.

30.

Richard Rorty articulates this boundless hope in his 1982 book Consequences of Pragmatism, where he applies his framework of wholesale hope versus retail hope.

31.

Richard 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.

32.

Haack believes Richard Rorty's neopragmatism is anti-philosophical and anti-intellectual, and exposes people further to rhetorical manipulation.

33.

Richard Rorty was criticized for his rejection of the idea that science can depict the world.

34.

One criticism, especially of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, is that Richard Rorty's philosophical hero, the ironist, is an elitist figure.

35.

Richard Rorty argues that most people would be "commonsensically nominalist and historicist" but not ironist.

36.

Richard Rorty's essay "The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres" is a thorough description of how he treats the greats in the history of philosophy.