Richard Rorty

Richard Rorty
Born	Richard McKay Rorty (1931-10-04)October 4, 1931 New York City, New York, U.S.
Died	June 8, 2007(2007-06-08)(aged 75) Palo Alto, California,U.S.
Alma mater	University of Chicago(BA,MA) Yale University(PhD)
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Neopragmatism(early) Postanalytic philosophy(late)
Institutions	Wellesley College Princeton University University of Virginia Stanford University
Doctoral advisor	Paul Weiss
Doctoral students	Robert Brandom,Michael Williams
Main interests	Epistemology Philosophy of language Philosophy of mind Ethics Metaphilosophy Liberalism Postmodernism
Notable ideas	Postphilosophy Ironism Final vocabulary Epistemologicalbehaviorism Antirepresentationalism Anti-foundationalism Reformist left(as opposed tocultural left) Edifying philosophy(as opposed tosystematic philosophy) Sentimentalityas thefoundationof human rights

Richard McKay Rorty(October 4, 1931 – June 8, 2007) was anAmerican philosopher.Educated at theUniversity of ChicagoandYale University,he had strong interests and training in both thehistory of philosophyand in contemporaryanalytic philosophy.Rorty's academic career included appointments as the Stuart Professor of Philosophy atPrinceton University,theKenanProfessor of Humanities at theUniversity of Virginia,and as a professor ofcomparative literatureatStanford University.Among his most influential books arePhilosophy and the Mirror of Nature(1979),Consequences of Pragmatism(1982), andContingency, Irony, and Solidarity(1989).

Rorty rejected the long-held idea that correct internal representations of objects in the outside world are a necessary prerequisite for knowledge. Rorty argued instead that knowledge is aninternalandlinguisticaffair; knowledge relates only to our own language.Rorty argues that language is made up of vocabularies that are temporary and historical,and concludes that "since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths."The acceptance of the preceding arguments leads to what Rorty calls "ironism";a state of mind where people are completely aware that their knowledge is dependent on their time and place in history, and are therefore somewhat detached from their own beliefs.However, Rorty also argues that "a belief can still regulate action, can still be thought worth dying for, among people who are quite aware that this belief is caused by nothing deeper than contingent historical circumstance."

Biography

Richard Rorty was born on October 4, 1931, in New York City.His parents,Jamesand Winifred Rorty, were activists, writers and social democrats. His maternal grandfather,Walter Rauschenbusch,was a central figure in theSocial Gospelmovement of the early 20th century.

His father experienced two nervous breakdowns in his later life. The second breakdown, which he had in the early 1960s, was more serious and "included claims to divine prescience."Consequently, Richard Rorty fell into depression as a teenager and in 1962 began a six-year psychiatric analysis forobsessional neurosis.Rorty wrote about the beauty of rural New Jersey orchids in his short autobiography, "Trotskyand the Wild Orchids, "and his desire to combine aesthetic beauty and social justice.His colleagueJürgen Habermas's obituary for Rorty points out that Rorty's childhood experiences led him to a vision of philosophy as the reconciliation of "the celestial beauty of orchids with Trotsky's dream of justice on earth."Habermas describes Rorty as an ironist:

Nothing is sacred to Rorty the ironist. Asked at the end of his life about the "holy", the strictatheistanswered with words reminiscent of the youngHegel:"My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law."

Rorty enrolled at theUniversity of Chicagoshortly before turning 15, where he received a bachelor's and a master's degree in philosophy (studying underRichard McKeon),continuing atYale Universityfor a PhD in philosophy (1952–1956).He married another academic,Amélie Oksenberg(Harvard Universityprofessor), with whom he had a son, Jay Rorty, in 1954. After two years in theUnited States Army,he taught atWellesley Collegefor three years until 1961.Rorty divorced his wife and then marriedStanford UniversitybioethicistMary Varney in 1972. They had two children, Kevin and Patricia, now Max. While Richard Rorty was a "strict atheist" (Habermas),Mary Varney Rorty was a practicingMormon.

Rorty was a professor of philosophy atPrinceton Universityfor 21 years.In 1981, he was a recipient of aMacArthur Fellowship,commonly known as the "Genius Grant", in its first year of awarding, and in 1982 he became Kenan Professor of the Humanities at theUniversity of Virginia,working closely with colleagues and students in multiple departments, especially in English.In 1998 Rorty became professor ofcomparative literature(and philosophy, by courtesy), atStanford University,where he spent the remainder of his academic career.During this period he was especially popular, and once quipped that he had been assigned to the position of "transitory professor of trendy studies."

Rorty's doctoral dissertation,The Concept ofPotentialitywas a historical study of the concept, completed under the supervision ofPaul Weiss,but his first book (as editor),The Linguistic Turn(1967), was firmly in the prevailinganalyticmode, collecting classic essays on thelinguistic turnin analytic philosophy. However, he gradually became acquainted with the American philosophical movement known aspragmatism,particularly the writings ofJohn Dewey.The noteworthy work being done by analytic philosophers such asWillard Van Orman QuineandWilfrid Sellarscaused significant shifts in his thinking, which were reflected in his next book,Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature(1979).

Pragmatistsgenerally hold that the meaning of a proposition is determined by its use in linguistic practice. Rorty combined pragmatism about truth and other matters with alaterWittgensteinianphilosophy of language,which declares thatmeaningis a social-linguistic product, and sentences do not "link up" with the world in a correspondence relation. Rorty wrote inContingency, Irony, and Solidarity(1989):

Truth cannot be out there—cannot exist independently of the human mind—because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own unaided by the describing activities of humans cannot. (p. 5)

Views like this led Rorty to question many of philosophy's most basic assumptions—and also led to his being apprehended as apostmodern/deconstructionistphilosopher. Indeed, from the late 1980s through the 1990s, Rorty focused on thecontinental philosophical tradition,examining the works ofFriederich Nietzsche,Martin Heidegger,Michel Foucault,Jean-François LyotardandJacques Derrida.His work from this period includesContingency, Irony, and Solidarity(1989),Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical PapersII(1991), andTruth and Progress: Philosophical Papers III(1998). The latter two works attempt to bridge the dichotomy between analytic and continental philosophy by claiming that the two traditions complement rather than oppose each other.

According to Rorty, analytic philosophy may not have lived up to its pretensions and may not have solved the puzzles it thought it had. Yet such philosophy, in the process of finding reasons for putting those pretensions and puzzles aside, helped earn itself an important place in the history of ideas. By giving up on the quest forapodicticityand finality thatEdmund Husserlshared withRudolf CarnapandBertrand Russell,and by finding new reasons for thinking that such quest will never succeed, analytic philosophy cleared a path that leads pastscientism,just as theGerman idealistscleared a path that led aroundempiricism.

In the last fifteen years of his life, Rorty continued to publish his writings, includingPhilosophy as Cultural Politics(Philosophical Papers IV), andAchieving Our Country(1998), a political manifesto partly based on readings of Dewey andWalt Whitmanin which he defended the idea of aprogressive,pragmatic left against what he felt were defeatist, anti-liberal,anti-humanistpositions espoused by the critical left and continental school. Rorty felt these anti-humanist positions were personified by figures like Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault. Such theorists were also guilty of an "inverted Platonism" in which they attempted to craft overarching, metaphysical, "sublime" philosophies—which in fact contradicted their core claims to be ironist and contingent.

According to Eduardo Mendieta "Rorty described himself as a 'postmodern bourgeois liberal', even if he also attacked the academic left, though not for being anti-truth, but for being unpatriotic. Rorty’sZenattitude about truth could easily be confused for a form of political relativism—aMachiavelliantype of politics. "

Rorty's last works, after his move to Stanford University concerned the place of religion in contemporary life, liberal communities, comparative literature and philosophy as "cultural politics."

Shortly before his death, he wrote a piece called "The Fire of Life" (published in the November 2007 issue ofPoetrymagazine)in which he meditates on his diagnosis and the comfort of poetry. He concludes:

I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death thatSwinburneandLandorknew butEpicurusand Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts—just as I would have if I had made more close friends. Cultures with richer vocabularies are more fully human—farther removed from the beasts—than those with poorer ones; individual men and women are more fully human when their memories are amply stocked with verses.

On June 8, 2007, Rorty died in his home frompancreatic cancer.

Major works

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

Main article:Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

InPhilosophy and the Mirror of Nature(1979) Rorty argues that the central problems of modernepistemologydepend upon a picture of the mind as trying to faithfully represent (or "mirror" ) a mind-independent, external reality. When we give up this metaphor, the entire enterprise offoundationalist epistemologysimply dissolves.

An epistemological foundationalist believes that in order to avoid the regress inherent in claiming that all beliefs are justified by other beliefs, some beliefs must be self-justifying and form the foundations to all knowledge. Rorty however criticized both the idea that arguments can be based upon self-evident premises (within language) and the idea that arguments can be based upon noninferential sensations (outside language).

The first critique draws on Quine's work on sentences thought to beanalytically true– that is, sentences thought to be true solely by virtue of what they mean and independently of fact.Quine argues that the problem with analytically true sentences is the attempt toconvertidentity-based but empty analytical truths like "no unmarried man is married" to synonymity-based analytical truths like "no bachelor is married."When trying to do so, one must first prove that "unmarried man" and "bachelor" means exactly the same, and that is not possible without considering facts – that is, looking towards the domain ofsynthetic truths.When doing so, one will notice that the two concepts actually differ; "bachelor" sometimes mean "bachelor of arts" for instance.Quine therefore argues that "a boundary between analytic and synthetic statements simply has not been drawn", and concludes that this boundary or distinction "[...] is an unempirical dogma of empiricists, a metaphysical article of faith."

The second critique draws on Sellars's work on the empiricist idea that there is a non-linguistic but epistemologically relevant "given" available in sensory perception. Sellars argue that only language can work as a foundation for arguments; non-linguistic sensory perceptions are incompatible with language and are therefore irrelevant. In Sellars' view, the claim that there is an epistemologically relevant "given" in sensory perception is a myth; a fact is not something that isgivento us, it is something that we as language-users activelytake.Only after we have learned a language is it possible for us to construe as "empirical data" the particulars and arrays of particulars we have come to be able to observe.

Each critique, taken alone, provides a problem for a conception of how philosophy ought to proceed but leaves enough of the tradition intact to proceed with its former aspirations. Combined, Rorty claimed, the two critiques are devastating. With no privileged realm of truth or meaning that can work as a self-evident foundation for our arguments, we have instead only truth defined as beliefs that pay their way: in other words, beliefs that are useful to us somehow. The only worthwhile description of the actual process of inquiry, Rorty claimed, was aKuhnianaccount of the standard phases of the progress of disciplines, oscillating throughnormaland abnormal periods, between routine problem-solving and intellectual crises.

After rejecting foundationalism, Rorty argues that one of the few roles left for a philosopher is to act as an intellectual gadfly, attempting to induce a revolutionary break with previous practice, a role that Rorty was happy to take on himself. Rorty suggests that each generation tries to subject all disciplines to the model that the most successful discipline of the day employs. In Rorty's view, the success of modern science has led academics in philosophy and the humanities to mistakenly imitate scientific methods.

Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

Main article:Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

InContingency, Irony, and Solidarity(1989), Rorty argues that there is no worthwhile theory of truth, aside from the non-epistemicsemantictheoryDonald Davidsondeveloped (based on the work ofAlfred Tarski).Rorty also suggests that there are two kinds of philosophers; philosophers occupied withprivateorpublicmatters. Private philosophers, who provide one with greater abilities to (re)create oneself (a view adapted from Nietzscheand which Rorty also identifies with the novels ofMarcel ProustandVladimir Nabokov) should not be expected to help with public problems. For apublic philosophy,one might instead turn to philosophers likeRawlsorHabermas,even though, according to Rorty, the latter is a "liberal who doesn't want to be an ironist".While Habermas believes that histheory of communicative rationalityconstitutes an update of rationalism, Rorty thinks that the latter and any "universal" pretensions should be totally abandoned.

This book also marks his first attempt to specifically articulate a political vision consistent with his philosophy, the vision of a diverse community bound together by opposition to cruelty, and not by abstract ideas such as "justice" or "common humanity." Consistent with his anti-foundationalism, Rorty states that there is "no noncircular theoretical backup for the belief that cruelty is horrible."

Rorty also introduces the terminology ofironism,which he uses to describe his mindset and his philosophy. Rorty describes the ironist as a person who "worries that the process of socialization which turned her into a human being by giving her a language may have given her the wrong language, and so turned her into the wrong kind of human being. But she cannot give a criterion of wrongness."

Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth

Rorty describes the project of this essay collection as trying to "offer an antirepresentationalist account of the relation between natural science and the rest of culture."Amongst the essays inObjectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1(1990), is "The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy," in which Rorty defends Rawls againstcommunitariancritics. Rorty argues that liberalism can "get along without philosophical presuppositions," while at the same time conceding to communitarians that "a conception of the self that makes the community constitutive of the self does comport well with liberal democracy."Moreover, for Rorty Rawls could be compared toHabermas,a sort of United States' Habermas, with E. Mendieta's words: "AnEnlightenmentfigure who thought that all we have is communicative reason and the use of public reason, two different names for the same thing—the use of reason by a public for the purpose of deciding how to live collectively and what aims should be the goal of the public good ". For Rorty, social institutions ought to be thought of as "experiments in cooperation rather than as attempts to embody a universal and ahistorical order."

Essays on Heidegger and Others

In this text, Rorty focuses primarily on the continental philosophersMartin HeideggerandJacques Derrida.He argues that these European "post-Nietzscheans" share much with American pragmatists, in that they critique metaphysics and reject thecorrespondence theory of truth.Taking up and developing what he had argued in previous works,Rorty claims that Derrida is most useful when viewed as a funny writer who attempted to circumvent the Western philosophical tradition, rather than the inventor of a philosophical (or literary) "method". In this vein, Rorty criticizes Derrida's followers likePaul de Manfor taking deconstructive literary theory too seriously.

Achieving Our Country

Main article:Achieving Our Country

InAchieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America(1998), Rorty differentiates between what he sees as the two sides of the Left, a cultural Left and a progressive Left. He criticizes the cultural Left, which is exemplified by post-structuralists such as Foucault and postmodernists such as Lyotard, for offering critiques of society, but no alternatives (or alternatives that are so vague and general as to be abdications). Although these intellectuals make insightful claims about the ills of society, Rorty suggests that they provide no alternatives and even occasionally deny the possibility of progress. On the other hand, the progressive Left, exemplified for Rorty by thepragmatistJohn Dewey,WhitmanandJames Baldwin,makes hope for a better future its priority. Without hope, Rorty argues, change is spiritually inconceivable and the cultural Left has begun to breed cynicism. Rorty sees the progressive Left as acting in the philosophical spirit of pragmatism.

On human rights

Rorty's notion of human rights isgroundedon the notion ofsentimentality.He contended that throughout history humans have devised various means of construing certain groups of individuals as inhuman or subhuman. Thinking in rationalist (foundationalist) terms will not solve this problem, he claimed. Rorty advocated the creation of a culture of global human rights in order to stop violations from happening through a sentimental education. He argued that we should create a sense ofempathyor teach empathy to others so as to understand others' suffering.

On hope

Rorty advocates for what philosopher Nick Gall characterizes as a "boundless hope" or type of "melancholicmeliorism."According to this view, Rorty replaces foundationalist hopes for certainty with those of perpetual growth and constant change, which he believes enables us to send conversation and hopes in new directions we currently can't imagine.

Rorty articulates this boundless hope in his 1982 bookConsequences of Pragmatism,where he applies his framework of wholesale hope versus retail hope. Herein he says, "Let me sum up by offering a third and final characterization of pragmatism: It is the doctrine that there are no constraints on inquiry save conversational ones-no wholesale constraints derived from the nature of the objects, or of the mind, or of language, but only those retail constraints provided by the remarks of our fellow inquirers."

Reception and criticism

Rorty is among the most widely discussed and controversial contemporary philosophers,and his works have provoked thoughtful responses from many other well-respected figures in the field. InRobert Brandom's anthologyRorty and His Critics,for example, Rorty's philosophy is discussed byDonald Davidson,Jürgen Habermas,Hilary Putnam,John McDowell,Jacques Bouveresse,andDaniel Dennett,among others.In 2007,Roger Scrutonwrote, "Rorty was paramount among those thinkers who advance their own opinion as immune to criticism, by pretending that it is not truth but consensus that counts, while defining the consensus in terms of people like themselves."Ralph Marvin Tumaob concludes that Rorty was influenced byJean-François Lyotard'smetanarratives,and added that "postmodernism was influenced further by the works of Rorty".

McDowell is strongly influenced by Rorty, particularlyPhilosophy and the Mirror of Nature(1979).In continental philosophy, authors such as Jürgen Habermas,Gianni Vattimo,Jacques Derrida,Albrecht Wellmer,Hans Joas,Chantal Mouffe,Simon Critchley,Esa Saarinen,andMike Sandbotheare influenced in different ways by Rorty's thinking. American novelistDavid Foster Wallacetitled a short story in his collectionOblivion: Stories"Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature," and critics have identified Rorty's influence in some of Wallace's writings on irony.

Susan Haackhas been a fierce critic of Rorty's neopragmatism. Haack criticises Rorty's claim to be a pragmatist at all and wrote a short play calledWe Pragmatists,where Rorty andCharles Sanders Peircehave a fictional conversation using only accurate quotes from their own writing. For Haack, the only link between Rorty's neopragmatism and Peirce's pragmatism is the name. Haack believes Rorty's neopragmatism is anti-philosophical and anti-intellectual, and exposes people further to rhetorical manipulation.

Although Rorty was an avowed liberal, his political and moral philosophies have been attacked by commentators from the Left, some of whom believe them to be insufficient frameworks for social justice.Rorty was also criticized for his rejection of the idea that science can depict the world.One criticism, especially ofContingency, Irony, and Solidarity,is that Rorty's philosophical hero, theironist,is an elitist figure.Rorty argues that most people would be "commonsensically nominalist and historicist" but not ironist. They would combine an ongoing attention to the particular as opposed to the transcendent (nominalism) with an awareness of their place in a continuum of contingent lived experience alongside other individuals (historicist), without necessarily having continual doubts about the resulting worldview as the ironist does. An ironist is someone who "has radical and continuing doubts about theirfinal vocabulary",that is" a set of words which they [humans] employ to justify their actions, their beliefs, and their lives ";" realizes that argument phrased in their vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts "; and" does not think their vocabulary is closer to reality than others ".On the other hand, the Italian philosopherGianni Vattimoand the Spanish philosopherSantiago Zabalain their 2011 bookHermeneutic Communism: from Heidegger to Marxaffirm that

together with Richard Rorty we also consider it a flaw that "the main thing contemporary academic Marxists inherit from Marx and Engels is the conviction that the quest for the cooperative commonwealth should be scientific rather than utopian, knowing rather than romantic." As we will show hermeneutics contains all the utopian and romantic features that Rorty refers to because, contrary to the knowledge of science, it does not claim modern universality but rather postmodern particularism.

Rorty often draws on a broad range of other philosophers to support his views, and his interpretation of their work has been contested.Since he is working from a tradition of reinterpretation, he is not interested in "accurately" portraying other thinkers, but rather in using it in the same way a literary critic might use a novel. His essay "The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres" is a thorough description of how he treats the greats in the history of philosophy. InContingency, Irony, and Solidarity,Rorty attempts to disarm those who criticize his writings by arguing that their philosophical criticisms are made using axioms that are explicitly rejected within Rorty's own philosophy.For instance, he defines allegations of irrationality as affirmations of vernacular "otherness", and so—Rorty argues—accusations of irrationality can be expected duringanyargument and must simply be brushed aside.

Awards and honors

• 1973:Guggenheim Fellowship
• 1981:MacArthur Fellowship
• 1983: Elected to theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 2005: Elected to theAmerican Philosophical Society
• 2007: TheThomas Jefferson Medal,awarded by theAmerican Philosophical Society

Select bibliography

As author

• Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.
• Consequences of Pragmatism.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982.ISBN978-0816610631
• Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.ISBN978-0521353816
• Philosophical Papersvols. I–IV:
  • Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers I.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.ISBN978-0521353694
  • Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers II.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
  • Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers III.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
  • Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers IV.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
• Mind, Language, and Metaphilosophy: Early Philosophical PapersEds. S. Leach and J. Tartaglia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.ISBN978-1107612297.
• Achieving Our Country:Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.ISBN978-0674003118
• Philosophy and Social Hope.New York: Penguin, 2000.
• Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies: A Conversation with Richard Rorty.Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2002.
• The Future of ReligionwithGianni VattimoEd. Santiago Zabala. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.ISBN978-0231134941
• An Ethics for Today: Finding Common Ground Between Philosophy and Religion.New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.ISBN978-0231150569
• What's the Use of Truth?withPascal Engel,transl. by William McCuaig, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007ISBN9780231140140
• On Philosophy and Philosophers: Unpublished papers 1960-2000,Ed. by W. P. Małecki and Chris Vopa, CUPress 2020ISBN9781108488457
• Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism,Ed. E. Mendieta, foreword by Robert B. Brandom, Harvard UP 2021,ISBN9780674248915

As editor

• The Linguistic Turn, Essays in Philosophical Method,(1967), edited by Richard M. Rorty, University of Chicago Press, 1992,ISBN978-0226725697(an introduction and two retrospective essays)
• Philosophy in History.edited by Richard M. Rorty,J. B. Schneewind,andQuentin Skinner,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985 (an essay by Richard M. Rorty, "Historiography of Philosophy", pp. 29–76)

See also

• Instrumentalism
• List of American philosophers
• List of liberal theorists
• List of thinkers influenced by deconstruction

Further reading

• Randall Auxier, Eli Kramer, Krzysztof Piotr Skowroński,eds.,Rorty and Beyond,2019
• Ulf Schulenberg,Romanticism and Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Idea of a Poeticized Culture,2015
• Krzysztof Piotr Skowroński,Values, Valuations, and Axiological Norms in Richard Rorty's Neopragmatism,2015
• Marianne Janack,What We Mean By Experience,2012
• Marianne Janack,editor,Feminist Interpretations of Richard Rorty,2010
• James Tartaglia,Richard Rorty: Critical Assessments,4 vols., 2009
• Neil Gross,Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher,2008
• Gross, Neil. 2019.Richard Rorty: the Making of an American Philosopher.University of Chicago Press.
• Rorty's Politics of Redescription/ Gideon Calder, 2007
• Rorty and the Mirror of Nature/ James Tartaglia, 2007
• Richard Rorty: Pragmatism and Political Liberalism/ Michael Bacon, 2007
• Richard Rorty: politics and vision/ Christopher Voparil, 2006
• Richard Rorty: his philosophy under discussion/ Andreas Vieth, 2005
• Richard Rorty/ Charles B Guignon., 2003
• Rorty/ Gideon Calder, 2003
• Richard Rorty's American faith/ Taub, Gad Shmuel, 2003
• The ethical ironist: Kierkegaard, Rorty, and the educational quest/ Rohrer, Patricia Jean, 2003
• Doing philosophy as a way to individuation: Reading Rorty and Cavell/ Kwak, Duck-Joo, 2003
• Richard Rorty/ Alan R Malachowski, 2002
• Richard Rorty: critical dialogues/ Matthew Festenstein, 2001
• Richard Rorty: education, philosophy, and politics/ Michael Peters, 2001
• Rorty and his critics/ Robert Brandom, 2000
• On Rorty/ Richard Rumana, 2000
• Philosophy and freedom: Derrida, Rorty, Habermas, Foucault/ John McCumber, 2000
• A pragmatist's progress?: Richard Rorty and American intellectual history/ John Pettegrew, 2000
• Problems of the modern self: Reflections on Rorty, Taylor, Nietzsche, and Foucault/ Dudrick, David Francis, 2000
• The last conceptual revolution: a critique of Richard Rorty's political philosophy/ Eric Gander, 1999
• Richard Rorty's politics: liberalism at the end of the American century/ Markar Melkonian, 1999
• The work of friendship: Rorty, his critics, and the project of solidarity/ Dianne Rothleder, 1999
• For the love of perfection: Richard Rorty and liberal education/ René Vincente Arcilla, 1995
• Rorty & pragmatism: the philosopher responds to his critics/ Herman J Saatkamp, 1995
• Richard Rorty: prophet and poet of the new pragmatism/ David L Hall, 1994
• Reading Rorty: critical responses to Philosophy and the mirror of nature (and beyond)/ Alan R Malachowski, 1990
• Rorty's humanistic pragmatism: philosophy democratized/ Konstantin Kolenda, 1990

External links

• Quotations related toRichard Rortyat Wikiquote
• Media related toRichard Rortyat Wikimedia Commons
• Richard RortyatCurlie
• UCIspace @ the Libraries digital collection: Richard Rorty born digital files, 1988–2003
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry
• Rorty audio,"Dewey and Posner on Pragmatism and Moral Progress,"University of Chicago Law School,April 14, 2006.
• PhilWeb's entry for Richard RortyAn exhaustive compilation of on-line links and off-line sources.
• Rorty essayspublished inDissent(magazine)
• Rorty audio,informative interview by Prof.Robert P. Harrison,Nov. 22, 2005.
• Rorty interview,"Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies," conducted by Derek Nystrom & Kent Puckett, Prickly Paradigm Press, Sept. 1998.
• Rorty interview,The Atlantic Monthly,April 23, 1998.
• Rorty Memorial LecturebyJürgen Habermas,Stanford University, Nov. 2, 2007.
• Rorty eulogizedby Richard Posner, Brian Eno, Mark Edmundson, Jürgen Habermas, Daniel Dennett, Stanley Fish, David Bromwich, Simon Blackburn, Morris Dickstein & others,Slate Magazine,June 18, 2007.
• "The Inspiring Power of the Shy Thinker: Richard Rorty"by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht,Telos,June 13, 2007.
• Richard Rorty at Princeton: Personal RecollectionsbyRaymond GeussinArion,Winter 2008
• Rereading RortybyAlbrecht WellmerinKrisis,2008.