.jpg?width=500 "Kant")
PHILOSOPHERS NEWSContemporary philosophers · ideas · books
Philosopher
American pragmatist — against the mirror of nature, for the liberal ironist and the priority of democracy to philosophy
Stanford University (comparative literature, emeritus); formerly Princeton and the University of Virginia · United States · d. 4 October 1931 — 8 June 2007
An American philosopher who turned the resources of analytic philosophy (Sellars, Quine, Davidson, Kuhn) against its own foundational ambitions. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) argued that knowledge is a matter of justification to one's peers, not accurate representation; Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) described the 'liberal ironist', who doubts her own final vocabulary while holding that cruelty is the worst thing we do. Achieving Our Country (1998) rebuked the academic left and warned of a 'strongman'. He taught at Princeton, Virginia and Stanford and was a MacArthur Fellow in 1981.
Richard Rorty asked philosophy to stop pretending it could underwrite science, morals and politics, and to settle instead for making cruelty harder to ignore. Thirty years on, with the strongman passage from Achieving Our Country quoted in every election, the question is whether his liberal ironist can still hold the line.
Richard Rorty
