Richard Rorty
Richard McKay Rorty (October 4, 1931 – June 8, 2007) worked as an American philosopher. He had a long and diverse academic career, including positions as Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia, and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. Educated at the University of Chicago and then Yale University, he had strong interests and training in both the history of philosophy, as well as contemporary analytic philosophy, the latter comprising the main focus of his work at Princeton in the 1960s. He subsequently came to reject the tradition of philosophy according to which knowledge concerns correctly representing a world whose existence remains wholly independent of those representations. This idea of knowledge as a "mirror of nature" he correctly saw as pervasive throughout the history of western philosophy. Against this approach, Rorty advocated for a novel form of American pragmatism, sometimes called neopragmatism, in which scientific and philosophical methods form merely a set of contingent "vocabularies" which people abandon or adopt over time according to social conventions and usefulness.
Read more about Richard Rorty.
Famous quotes containing the words richard rorty, richard and/or rorty:
“There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.”
—Richard Rorty (b. 1931)
“Stay on the beach. The natives over there are cannibals. They eat liars with the same enthusiasm as they eat honest men.”
—Earl Felton, and Richard Fleischer. Captain Nemo (James Mason)
“The usual picture of Socrates is of an ugly little plebeian who inspired a handsome young nobleman to write long dialogues on large topics.”
—Richard Rorty (b. 1931)