Richard Rorty
Biographic Data
| ID | 275407 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Richard Rorty |
| GIVEN NAMES | Richard |
| FAMILY NAME | Rorty |
| SIGNATURE | RORTY R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stanford University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 127 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 495 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 126 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1961 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Introduction: Richard Rorty, Pragmatic Provocateur
This essay introduces a running symposium on the work of Richard Rorty and its legacy fifteen years after his passing. The arc of Rorty's thought defines a trajectory through American pragmatism, tracing a variation unimagined until he expressed it. His work raised Anglophone philosophers' interest in American pragmatism as never before and also focused the interest of the whole world on American pragmatism as never before, even though the result…
Trotsky and the Wild Orchids
Among Rorty's most admired essays, and probably his most autobiographical, "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids" made its first appearance as a column in Common Knowledge during the journal's inaugural year. Here it is reprinted, thirty years later, in a symposium called "Whatever Happened to Richard Rorty?" He explains in this essay that, as a child, he loved things that would seem to others contradictory, for example the Trotskian socialism to which h…
Idealizations, Foundations, and Social Practices
Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism
The last book by the eminent American philosopher and public intellectual Richard Rorty, providing the definitive statement of his mature philosophical and political views. Richard Rorty's Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism is a last statement by one of America's foremost philosophers. Here Rorty offers his culminating thoughts on the influential version of pragmatism he began to articulate decades ago in his groundbreaking Philosophy and the Mi…
Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism
Given a language and a view of what the world is like, one can, to be sure, pair off bits of the language with bits of what one takes the world to be in such a way that the sentences one believes true have internal structures isomorphic to relations between things in the world. Traditional, Platonic, epistemologically-centred philosophy is the search for such procedures. It is the search for a way in which one can avoid the need for conversation …
Autobiographie intellectuelle
Dans cet article autobiographique, Richard Rorty se livre à une méditation très personnelle sur sa jeunesse, sa formation intellectuelle et les enjeux philosophiques de l'élaboration progressive de sa pensée. En évoquant les différentes étapes de son parcours universitaire, il nous propose un tableau saisissant du monde universitaire américain des années 1960-1980 et une réflexion précieuse sur les auteurs qui l'ont influencé, ainsi que sur la po…
Left-Wing Kuhnianism
In this brief essay Rorty comments on how some fear that Thomas Kuhn's widely persuasive view of science can and is being used to denigrate science or to reduce our sense of its difference from literature. Rorty goes on to argue that no part of culture should be invidiously set against another as in any way privileged. Questions about the epistemological status or rationality of different disciplines or areas of culture should be dismissed, he cl…
Love and Money
In this essay Rorty argues that care or concern alone is inadequate for dealing with problems of Third World poverty; neither is there likely to be a convenient technological fix. There is no evading the hard decisions that global poverty will require of the rich nations, and there is no way past E. M. Forster's dictum, in Howard's End, that "We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable and only to be approached by the statistici…
The Collapse of the Fact-Value Distinction and Other Essays by Hilary Putnam
Analytic philosophy and transformative philosophy
Ричард Рорти АНАЛИТИЧЕСКАЯ И ТРАНСФОРМАТИВНАЯ
Foucault and Epistemology
Michel Foucault would not accept the deflationary interpretation of the notion of ‘constitution’. He appears to think there is something philosophical and theoretical to be done with the notion of ‘discursive practices’ which will be more useful than what Hegel or Husserl did with the notion of ‘consciousness’. In such passages, Foucault writes like a contented inhabitant of the ‘system of possibilities’ offered by French academic philosophy, a s…
Contingencia, ironía y solidaridad
Getting Rid of the Appearance-Reality Distinction
Common sense distinguishes between the apparent color of a thing and its real color, between the apparent motions of heavenly bodies and their real motions, between nondairy creamer and real cream, and between imitation Rolexes and real ones. But only those with a taste for philosophy ask whether real Rolexes are really real. Only philosophers take seriously Plato’s distinction between Reality with a capital R and Appearance with a capital A. Tha…
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
Solidarity or Objectivity?
The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy
The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy
Solidarity or Objectivity?
Pragmatism and Democracy: Assessing Jeffrey Stout's Democracy and Tradition
Jeffrey Stout's Democracy and Tradition intervened in debates that had extended for more than two decades across the fields of religious ethics and the philosophy of religion. A central aim of the book was to mediate a long-standing impasse between theological traditionalists and liberal secularists. The former often described liberal democracy as inhospitable—if not positively antithetical—to the substance and particularity of theological claims…
An ethics for today: Finding Common Ground Between Philosophy and Religion
The Philosopher as Expert
Una ética para laicos
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: Thirtieth-Anniversary Edition
Richard Rorty's landmark book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, argues that the prevailing conception of philosophy in the West is based on a flawed Cartesian model. Rorty challenges the idea that knowledge is primarily representational, mirroring an external reality. He traces this view from the Greeks through Descartes and Kant, demonstrating how it has shaped philosophical discourse and led to unproductive debates about foundationalism and…
The Philosopher as Expert
Quelques usages américains de Hegel
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: Thirtieth-Anniversary Edition
Richard Rorty's landmark book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, argues that the prevailing conception of philosophy in the West is based on a flawed Cartesian model. Rorty challenges the idea that knowledge is primarily representational, mirroring an external reality. He traces this view from the Greeks through Descartes and Kant, demonstrating how it has shaped philosophical discourse and led to unproductive debates about foundationalism and…
Consequences of pragmatism: Essays, 1972-1980
Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism
The last book by the eminent American philosopher and public intellectual Richard Rorty, providing the definitive statement of his mature philosophical and political views. Richard Rorty's Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism is a last statement by one of America's foremost philosophers. Here Rorty offers his culminating thoughts on the influential version of pragmatism he began to articulate decades ago in his groundbreaking Philosophy and the Mi…
II. Thugs and Theorists: A Reply to Bernstein
The World Well Lost
Is Truth A Goal of Enquiry? Davidson Vs. Wright
Journal Article Is Truth a Goal of Enquiry? Davidson Vs. Wright Get access Richard Rorty Richard Rorty University of Virginia Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 45, Issue 180, July 1995, Pages 281–300, https://doi.org/10.2307/2219651 Published: 01 July 1995
Truth and Freedom: A Reply to Thomas McCarthy
Is "Cultural Recognition" a Useful Concept for Leftist Politics
It is not clear that "cultural recognition" should be a central goal of leftist politics. The idea that cultures have value simply by virtue of being cultures seems absurd, so it might be better to talk simply about eliminating prejudice and stigmatisation.Keywords: cultural recognitiondifferenceequalityAmerican leftcultural studies
Contingency, irony, and solidarity
American philosopher Richard Rorty argues that thinkers such as Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein have enabled societies to see themselves as historical contingencies, rather than as expressions of underlying, ahistorical human nature, or as realizations of suprahistorical goals. This ironic perspective on the human condition is valuable but it cannot advance Liberalism's social and political goals. In fact, Rorty believes that it is literature …
Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida
Philosophy as a Kind of Writing:An Essay on Derrida* Richard Rorty I Here is one way to look at physics: there are some invisible things which are parts of everything else and whose behavior determines the way everything else works. Physics is the search for an accurate description of those invisible things, and it proceeds by finding better and better explanations of the visible. Eventually, by way of microbiological accounts of the mental, and …
Pragmatism and Democracy: Assessing Jeffrey Stout's Democracy and Tradition
Jeffrey Stout's Democracy and Tradition intervened in debates that had extended for more than two decades across the fields of religious ethics and the philosophy of religion. A central aim of the book was to mediate a long-standing impasse between theological traditionalists and liberal secularists. The former often described liberal democracy as inhospitable—if not positively antithetical—to the substance and particularity of theological claims…
What Do You Do When They Call You a `Relativist
My own substantive philosophical views are so close to Brandom's that despair of finding an interesting point of difference. So shall discuss some public relations problems we both have. Such problems arise when proponents of controversial philosophical doctrines must choose between saying I can accommodate your intuition, by rephrasing it as follows and saying That is an intuition cannot accommodate, so suggest that you try to rid yourself of it…
Feminism, Ideology, and Deconstruction: A Pragmatist View
Neither philosophy in general, nor deconstruction in particular, should be thought of as a pioneering, path-breaking, tool for feminist politics. Recent philosophy, including Derrida's, helps us see practices and ideas (including patriarchal practices and ideas) as neither natural nor inevitable—but that is all it does. When philosophy has finished showing that everything is a social construct, it does not help us decide which social constructs t…
Philosophy-envy
Pragmatism
Taylor on Self-Celebration and Gratitude
In The Sources of Self, as in his earlier Philosophy and Human Sciences, Charles Taylor takes on two principal sets of opponents: reductionist naturalists, heirs of Enlightenment, on one hand and self-involved expressivists, heirs of Romanticism, on other . Taylor sees naturalists as caught in self-referential inconsistency, unable to account for own passionate belief that we ought to uncover irreducible reality behind reducible appearances. Theo…
Philosophy without Principles
Pragmatism, Categories, and Language
Who Are We: Moral Universalism and Economic Triage
In what sort of situation might someone ask the question "who are we?" It seems most appropriate in the mouth of someone trying to shape her audience into a more coherent community. It is the sort of rhetorical question a party leader might ask at a party rally. In such situations, it means something like "what unifying ideal can we find to make us less like a mob and more like an army, less like people thrown together by accident and more like p…
Indeterminacy of translation and of truth
Getting Rid of the Appearance-Reality Distinction
Common sense distinguishes between the apparent color of a thing and its real color, between the apparent motions of heavenly bodies and their real motions, between nondairy creamer and real cream, and between imitation Rolexes and real ones. But only those with a taste for philosophy ask whether real Rolexes are really real. Only philosophers take seriously Plato’s distinction between Reality with a capital R and Appearance with a capital A. Tha…
Deconstruction and Pragmatism
Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty are two of the most famous living philosophers. The current influence of Deconstruction and Pragmatism, two major intellectual traditions, would be unthinkable without their work. This ground-breaking book brings these two thinkers together in a critical confrontation between these two traditions. Derridean deconstruction and Rortian pragmatism are both accused by their enemies of undermining our ideas of truth a…
Representation, social practise, and truth
Contemporary philosophy of mind
Hope and the Future
Pragmatism, Categories, and Language
The Value Judgement
Chauncey Wright and the Foundations of Pragmatism
Charles Peirce and Scholastic Realism: A Study of Peirce's Relation to John Duns Scotus
The Origins of Pragmatism: Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce and William James
Indeterminacy of translation and of truth
The World Well Lost
Matter as goo: Comments on Grene's paper
On Human Conduct
Philosophy and the mirror of nature
De l'épistémologie à l'herméneutique
Freud, Morality, and Hermeneutics
T oward the end of his essay, talking about current attacks on psychoanalysis by those who would hermeneuticize or deconstruct it, Regis Durand remarks that There are those who feel that, far from being obsolete, the Einsteinian and the Freudian revolutions, for instance, have not yet come into their own, have not translated fully into our modes of thinking. I feel this very strongly, at least in respect to the Freudian revolution. Further, I agr…
Zur Lage der Gegenwartsphilosophie in den USA
Analytic philosophy has taken for granted an account of the history of philosophy which jumps straight from Kant to Frege, leaving out Hegel and most of the nineteenth century. Such an understandig (e.g., that of Reichenbach’s Rise of Scientific Philosophy) depends upon viewing philosophy as the solution of certain discrete and specific “problems” raised by e.g., discoveries in physics or mathematics. But the rejection of traditional positivist d…
Can We Ever Quite Change the Subject: Richard Rorty on Science, Literature, Culture, and the Future of Philosophy
Contemporary philosophy of mind
Consequences of pragmatism: Essays, 1972-1980
Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism
Complaints about the social irresponsibility of the intellectuals typically concern the intellectual's tendency to marginalize herself, to move out from one community by interior identification of herself with some other community – for example, another country or historical period, an invisible college, or some alienated subgroup within the larger community. Such marginalization is, however, common to intellectuals and to miners. In the early da…
Philosophy in History: Essays in the Historiography of Philosophy
The sixteen essays in this volume confront the current debate about the relationship between philosophy and its history. On the one hand intellectual historians commonly accuse philosophers of writing bad - anachronistic - history of philosophy, and on the other, philosophers have accused intellectual historians of writing bad - antiquarian - history of philosophy. The essays here address this controversy and ask what purpose the history of philo…
The historiography of philosophy: Four genres
Analytic philosophers who have attempted ‘rational reconstructions’ of the arguments of great dead philosophers have done so in the hope of treating these philosophers as contemporaries, as colleagues with whom they can exchange views. They have argued that unless one does this one might as well turn over the history of philosophy to historians – whom they picture as mere doxographers, rather than seekers after philosophical truth. Such reconstru…
Deconstruction and Circumvention
Diskussion/Discussion. A Reply to Six Critics
Professors Maclntyre and Rosenberg are more inclined than I to believe that ‘philosophy’ names a natural kind -- a distinctive sort of inquiry with a continuous history since the Greeks. Their criticisms of my book reflect this disagreement. Mr. Montefiore brings to light various ambiguities in my use of such terms as “edifying philosophy” and “Continental philosophy”. His criticisms make good points against the concluding portions of Philosophy …
Philosophy without Principles
From Logic to Language to Play a Plenary Address to the InterAmerican Congress
Richard Rorty, From Logic to Language to Play a Plenary Address to the InterAmerican Congress, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, Vol. 59, No. 5 (Jun., 1986), pp. 747-753
The Higher Nominalism in a Nutshell: A Reply to Henry Staten
Philosophy in History
Philosophy (97 works) · Epistemology (85 works) · Sociology (46 works) · Political science (42 works) · Law (38 works) · Pragmatism in Philosophy and Education (29 works) · Philosophy (28 works) · Politics (27 works) · Computer Science (23 works) · Pragmatism (20 works)