Richard Rorty: Internet Links

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RICHARD RORTY

Richard Rorty (1931-) is an American philosopher who was trained in the analytic tradition. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he has been influenced as much by Sartre and Heidegger as by Wittgenstein. Rorty has been able to articulate the post-modern concerns of 'continental philosophy' in the language game of Anglo-American academia. Rorty argues that ever since Descartes' "invention of the mind" philosophy has attempted to provide rock solid foundations for our understanding of the World. Kant thought that we interpret the world through universal timeless categories. The distinction was made between a mirroring non-natural mind and a mirrored natural world. The purpose of philosophy was to expose the shape of this mirror.

For Rorty human understanding is not based some objective structure of 'mind'. Rather we interpret the world through a variety of paradigms. If there is no objective philosophical standpoint then the idea that philosophy should be seen as the "queen of sciences", clarifying what counts as knowledge, is unsustainable. For Rorty the aim of philosophers should be, "to help their readers, or society as a whole, break free from outworn vocabularies and attitudes, rather than to provide 'grounding' for the intuitions and customs of the present."

Hermeneutics Defined (Catholic Encyclopedia)

Contingency, Irony and Solidarity at Amazon.com

PARTIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Linguistic Turn (editor)

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979)

Consequences of Pragmatism (1981)

Philosophy in History (1982, co-editor)

Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989)

Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1 (1991)

Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2 (1991)

LINKS

Coping With Nietzsche's Legacy