Not everyone will be interested in this, I know, but I think it
clarifies some of the issues Jim and Peter were struggling to articulate
with respect to Rorty's philosophy.
Also, it details his very interesting family background, about which I
knew nothing previously. Among other things, his grandfather founded the
"social gospel" movement (on which are based the policies of one of
Canada's major political parties).
Regards,
Chris Green
=================
Richard Rorty, 75; Leading U.S. Pragmatist Philosopher
By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 11, 2007; B06
Richard Rorty, 75, an intellectual whose often deeply unconventional
approach to mainstream philosophic thought brought him wide public
recognition as one of the leading thinkers of his era, died June 8 at his
home in Palo Alto, Calif. He had pancreatic cancer.
During Dr. Rorty's long teaching career -- at Princeton University, the
University of Virginia and, most recently, Stanford University -- he
championed the application of philosophy beyond academic corridors and hoped
to influence public discussions of democracy and liberalism. In 1981, he
received one of the first MacArthur Foundation "genius grants."
Such books as "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" and "Contingency, Irony
and Solidarity" brought Dr. Rorty broad recognition in his field, and his
essays for mainstream newspapers and magazines added to his stature.
His work was read not just in philosophy departments but also in classes on
literature and political theory. He once described his career as a 40-year
search about "what, if anything, philosophy was good for."
An heir to William James and John Dewey, Dr. Rorty advocated a philosophy
known as pragmatism, which shunned what he considered a fruitless search to
answer unknowable questions: What is the meaning of life? Do other people
exist? He had rejected the field of analytic philosophy on the ground that
it attempts to address those questions, which he largely considered a waste
of time, and had created something akin to a hunt for timeless truths,
another idea he strongly criticized.
His dismissal of analytic philosophy led some of his harshest critics,
including Bernard Williams of Oxford University, to write that Dr. Rorty was
a relativist who believed truth was dispensable. Dr. Rorty's supporters saw
an important distinction: that Dr. Rorty was carrying on the pragmatic
tradition of seeing truth as something created by humans in their struggle
to cope with the world around them and not simply eternal truths suddenly
found by them.
Michael Williams, philosophy department chairman at Johns Hopkins
University, said Dr. Rorty, one of his mentors, "taught the lesson there are
no fixed and permanent foundations for anything, that anything could be
changed. Where some see this as cause for despair, he saw this as cause for
hope because it meant we could always do better. . . . He reveled in
contingency," what happens as a result of human progress.
Williams added: "Instead of trying to define the essence of human nature,
Rorty thought we should creatively think up new possibilities for
ourselves -- what to be, how to live. He said we are not hostage to how
things are. He spoke of pragmatism as a future-oriented philosophy."
Richard McKay Rorty was born Oct. 4, 1931, in New York City. His parents
were writers and activists drawn to the socialist theories of Leon Trotsky,
and their social democratic influence pervaded Dr. Rorty's writings.
Another early influence on his thinking was his maternal grandfather, Walter
Rauschenbusch, a Baptist clergyman who founded the 19th-century American
"social gospel" movement.
As a child, Dr. Rorty was compelled by his parents to read two volumes of
the "Dewey Commission of Inquiry Into the Moscow Trials" and other tomes
steeped in tales of social injustice. He said such books were regarded "in
the way which other children thought of their family's Bible: They were
books that radiated redemptive truth and moral splendor."
He also recalled the importance of his childhood interest in wild orchids,
which he found near his parents' property in western New Jersey. He
developed a strong aesthetic yearning for such "socially useless flowers,"
he later wrote in his autobiographical essay "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids."
He spoke of hoping to find a way to balance this appreciation of pure beauty
with his parents' emphasis on intellectual purity -- and he described
philosophy as a way to work through his competing beliefs.
A precocious thinker, Dr. Rorty entered the University of Chicago at 15
after skipping several grades. He told London's Guardian newspaper, "I
escaped from the bullies who regularly beat me up on the playground of my
high school, bullies who, I assumed, would somehow wither away once
capitalism had been overcome."
At Chicago, he immersed himself in the Great Books program that was the
school's signature offering for undergraduates. For a time, he once wrote,
he admired Platonic thought because it "had all the advantages of religion,
without requiring the humility which Christianity demanded, and of which I
was apparently incapable."
By 1952, he had completed undergraduate and master's degrees in philosophy
from Chicago and went on to receive a doctorate in philosophy from Yale
University in 1956.
After Army service, he taught at Wellesley College and then at Princeton
from 1961 to 1982. He was the Kenan professor of humanities at the
University of Virginia from 1982 to 1998, when he retired for the first
time. He accepted a post-retirement teaching assignment at Stanford as a
professor of comparative literature and retired again in 2005.
He was a restless intellectual for much of his career. While editing the
1967 book "The Linguistic Turn," he expressed doubts about the idea that
analytic philosophy had made great progress by recasting traditional
questions about the relation between thought and reality as questions about
how language manages to represent the world.
Dr. Rorty saw such ideas as rephrasing the same old questions that he
considered as having outlived their usefulness.
Starting in the early 1970s, he began to break from mainstream analytic
philosophy in general, and this isolated him from many of his Princeton
colleagues who continued to see analytic streams of thought as vibrant.
His 1979 book, "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature," advanced many of his
controversial beliefs. The book sought to dispense with what he considered
the grandiose and fruitless attempts to seek out the foundations of
knowledge and ethics -- presented over the years as timeless truths. Instead
he wanted to focus on what was often called a nonfoundationalist philosophy
that combined teachings of Dewey, Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
In later years, Dr. Rorty's books "Contingency, Irony and Solidarity,"
"Achieving Our Country" and "Philosophy and Social Hope" used similar
arguments to discuss the nature of liberalism and how democracy can thrive
through pragmatic thought. This wound up addressing a spectrum of relevant
topics from feminism to human rights and how humans have found new ways to
treat one another as needs have arisen.
Regarded in some circles as an intellectual superstar, Dr. Rorty remained a
reserved, almost shy figure in person. He was known to reply courteously to
nearly all his mail, from everyone from undergraduates to fellow
philosophers who criticized him.
He could be a skeptical, self-deprecating thinker who had a vague sense that
his own contribution to modern philosophy might someday be seen as a passing
phase, that in the last analysis, there is no last analysis.
In private, he traveled from Australia to the Brazilian rain forest to
indulge an interest in bird-watching.
His marriage to philosopher Amelie Oksenberg Rorty ended in divorce.
Survivors include his wife of 34 years, biomedical ethicist Mary Varney
Rorty of Palo Alto; a son from his first marriage, Jay Rorty of Santa Cruz,
Calif.; two children from his second marriage, Patricia Rorty of Berkeley,
Calif., and Kevin Rorty of Richmond; and two grandchildren.
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