Analytic & pragmatist · 1931–2007
Richard Rorty
Neopragmatist who challenged philosophy’s claim to mirror reality
The mind is not a mirror of nature and philosophy cannot ground knowledge from outside our practices; we should aim at solidarity and less cruelty rather than at certainty.
Life and thought
Richard Rorty (1931–2007) grew up in New York among anti-Stalinist leftists, entered the University of Chicago at fifteen and took his PhD at Yale. Trained in analytic philosophy, he taught at Princeton until Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) set him against much of his profession; he left philosophy departments for posts in the humanities at Virginia and in comparative literature at Stanford.
Rorty argued that the picture of the mind as a mirror that represents reality, inherited from Descartes, Locke and Kant, has outlived its use. We cannot step outside our language and practices to check them against the world, so truth is not a matching of words to things but what our peers let us get away with saying, and philosophy should stop acting as the judge of all culture and join the conversation. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) he described the “liberal ironist”, who knows her deepest beliefs are contingent yet holds that cruelty is the worst thing we do. Critics called this relativism; he called it Dewey’s pragmatism brought up to date.