Richard Rorty
He argued that philosophy should give up hunting for certain foundations beneath our beliefs, and instead treat truth as whatever survives an open, ongoing conversation among free people.
Rorty trained as a rigorous analytic philosopher before writing the book that made him famous for attacking the whole tradition that had trained him. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature argued that the central image organizing Western philosophy since Descartes and Locke (the mind as a mirror trying to accurately represent an external world, with philosophy's job being to inspect and polish that mirror) was a picture we should simply drop, not a problem requiring a better solution. There is no neutral vantage point from which to check whether our beliefs match reality, he argued, so philosophy's traditional ambition to provide secure foundations for knowledge was a project chasing an illusion, and epistemology should give way to something closer to ongoing conversation between different, incommensurable vocabularies, none of which gets to claim final authority over the others. He drew on Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger to build what he called a pragmatist alternative: truth is not a matter of correspondence to reality but simply what our peers will, for now, let us get away with saying, and the point of intellectual life is to keep the conversation of humanity going rather than to reach some final, mirror-perfect description of how things really are. This made him deeply controversial on both sides of a divide he found unnecessary: analytic philosophers accused him of an anything-goes relativism that made truth arbitrary, while he insisted he was only ever attacking a specific, historically contingent picture of what truth-seeking must look like, not truth itself. In his later years he turned toward political writing, defending an unapologetic, hopeful liberalism and arguing that American intellectuals had grown too attached to theoretical purity and too disconnected from the concrete work of building a fairer country, a case he made most directly in Achieving Our Country.
Places
Ideas
Words
“Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with saying.”
“The idea that one has had, or can have, a great vision has been replaced by the idea that the way to have the good, communal life is to abjure the very notion of having such a vision.”
Works
Life & Moments
Publishes Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
Rorty, trained as a rigorous analytic philosopher, argued that philosophy's central image of the mind as a mirror representing reality should be abandoned rather than perfected, provoking controversy from analytic philosophers who accused him of relativism.
Publishes Achieving Our Country
In his later years Rorty turned toward political writing, defending an unapologetic liberalism and arguing that American intellectuals had grown too attached to theoretical purity and too disconnected from building a fairer country.
Influence
Influenced by
- John Dewey
Rorty explicitly named Dewey, alongside Wittgenstein and Heidegger, as one of the three philosophers whose work pointed beyond the search for secure epistemological foundations toward treating inquiry as an ongoing, self-correcting social practice.
- Martin Heidegger
Rorty drew on Heidegger's diagnosis that Western philosophy's fixation on stable presence and foundations was a historically contingent choice rather than a discovery about the nature of thought, feeding directly into his own attack on philosophy-as-mirror.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
Rorty took the later Wittgenstein's picture of meaning as use within particular language games as evidence that philosophy's traditional hunt for one true vocabulary underlying all others was misguided from the start.
- Thomas Kuhn
Rorty took Kuhn's argument that rival paradigms lack a neutral standard of comparison as support for his own view that philosophy should give up the search for a framework standing outside every vocabulary.
- Jacques Derrida
Rorty admired Derrida while refusing the apparatus, reading him as a private ironist rather than a theorist of language, a domestication Derrida's followers resented and Rorty defended.
