We have lost another great philosopher; Professor Rorty died on Friday 8 June. The New York Time obituary below comes courtesy of Dr Dennis Hemphill, Professor Terry Roberts and Professor William Morgan.
The New York Times
June 11, 2007
Richard Rorty, Philosopher, Dies at 75
By PATRICIA COHEN
Richard Rorty, whose inventive work on philosophy, politics, literary
theory and more made him one of the world’s most influential
contemporary thinkers, died Friday in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 75.
The cause was complications from pancreatic cancer, said his wife,
Mary Varney Rorty.
Raised in a home where “The Case for Leon Trotsky” was viewed with
the same reverence as the Bible might be elsewhere, Mr. Rorty
pondered the nature of reality as well as its everyday struggles. “At
12, I knew that the point of being human was to spend one’s life
fighting social injustice,” he wrote in an autobiographical sketch.
Russell A. Berman, the chairman of the Department of Comparative
Literature at Stanford University, who worked with Mr. Rorty for more
than a decade, said, “He rescued philosophy from its analytic
constraints” and returned it “to core concerns of how we as a people,
a country and humanity live in a political community.”
Mr. Rorty’s enormous body of work, which ranged from academic tomes
to magazine and newspaper articles, provoked fervent praise,
hostility and confusion. But no matter what even his severest critics
thought of it, they could not ignore it. When his 1979 book
“Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” came out, it upended
conventional views about the very purpose and goals of philosophy.
The widespread notion that the philosopher’s primary duty was to
figure out what we can and cannot know was poppycock, Mr. Rorty
argued. Human beings should focus on what they do to cope with daily
life and not on what they discover by theorizing.
To accomplish this, he relied primarily on the only authentic
American philosophy, pragmatism, which was developed by John Dewey,
Charles Peirce, William James and others more than 100 years ago.
“There is no basis for deciding what counts as knowledge and truth
other than what one’s peers will let one get away with in the open
exchange of claims, counterclaims and reasons,” Mr. Rorty wrote. In
other words, “truth is not out there,” separate from our own beliefs
and language. And those beliefs and words evolved, just as opposable
thumbs evolved, to help human beings “cope with the environment” and
“enable them to enjoy more pleasure and less pain.”
Mr. Rorty drew on the works of Freud, Nietzsche, Heidegger,
Wittgenstein, Quine and others. Although he argued that “no area of
culture, and no period of history gets reality more right than any
other,” he did maintain that a liberal democratic society was by far
the best because it was the only one that permits competing beliefs
to exist while also creating a public community.
His views were attacked by critics on the left and the right. The
failure to recognize science’s particular powers to depict reality,
Daniel Dennett wrote, shows “flatfooted ignorance of the proven
methods of scientific truth-seeking and their power.”
Simon Blackburn, a philosopher at Cambridge University, has written
of Mr. Rorty’s “extraordinary gift for ducking and weaving and laying
smoke.”
Mr. Rorty was engaged with and amused by his critics. In a 1992
autobiographical essay, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” he wrote that
he was considered to be one of the “smirking intellectuals whose
writings are weakening the moral fiber of the young”; “cynical and
nihilistic”; “complacent”; and “irresponsible.”
Yet he confounded critics as well, by speaking up for patriotism, an
academic canon and the idea that one can make meaningful moral
judgments.
His reason for writing the 1992 essay, he said, was to show how he
came by his particular views. Richard McKay Rorty was born in 1931 to
James and Winifred Rorty, anti-Stalinist lefties who let their home
in Flatbrookville, N.J., a small town on the Delaware river, be used
as a hideout for wayward Trotskyites. He describes himself as having
“weird, snobbish, incommunicable interests” that as a boy led him to
send congratulations to the newly named Dalai Lama, a “fellow
8-year-old who had made good.”
Later, orchids became another obsession, and his love of the outdoors
continued throughout his life. An avid birder for the last 30 years,
Mr. Rorty liked to “head over to open spaces and walk around,” his
wife Mary said yesterday from their home in Palo Alto. His last bird
sighting was of a condor at the Grand Canyon in February. In addition
to his wife, Mr. Rorty is survived by three children and two
grandchildren.
When he was 15, Mr. Rorty wrote, he “escaped from the bullies who
regularly beat me up on the playground of my high school” to attend
the Hutchins School at the University of Chicago, a place A. J.
Liebling described as the “biggest collection of juvenile neurotics
since the Children’s Crusade.”
In his early career, at Wellesley and Princeton, he worked on
analytic philosophy, smack in the mainstream. As for the surrounding
1960s counterculture, he said in a 2003 interview, “I smoked a little
pot and let my hair grow long,” but “I soon decided that the radical
students who wanted to trash the university were people with whom I
would never have much sympathy.”
By the 1970s, it became clear that he did not have much sympathy for
analytic philosophy either, not to mention the entire Cartesian
philosophical tradition that held there was a world independent of
thought.
Later frustrated by the narrowness of philosophy departments, he
became a professor of humanities at the University of Virginia in
1982, before joining the comparative literature department at
Stanford in 1998.
Over time, he became increasingly occupied by politics. In “Achieving
Our Country” in 1998, he despaired that the genuine social-democratic
left that helped shape the politics of the Democratic Party from 1910
through 1965 had collapsed. In an interview, he said that since the
’60s, the left “has done a lot for the rights of blacks, women and
gays, but it never attempted to develop a political position that
might find the support of an electoral majority.”
In recent years, Mr. Rorty fiercely criticized the Bush
administration, the religious right, Congressional Democrats and
anti-American intellectuals. Though deeply pessimistic about the
dangers of nuclear confrontation and the gap between rich nations and
poor, Mr. Rorty retained something of Dewey’s hopefulness about
America. It is important, he said in 2003, to take pride “in the
heritage of figures like Jefferson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt,
Martin Luther King, and so on,” he said, and “to use this pride as a
means of generating sympathy” for a country’s political aims.
Washington Post
