Palo Alto

A university town built around Stanford, where Richard Rorty spent his final two decades arguing that philosophy should give up the search for certain foundations and treat truth as what a free, ongoing conversation settles on for now.

Palo Alto grew up around Stanford and then around the industry that came out of it. Rorty moved there in 1998 after a career that had travelled from analytic philosophy at Princeton to something the profession could not classify. He took a post in comparative literature rather than philosophy, which suited his view that the discipline had less to teach than it believed. He went on writing about politics and about the uses of literature until his death in 2007.