Rorty Richard (b.1931), American philosopher, notable for the breadth of his philosophical and cultural interests. He was educated at the University of Chicago and Yale and has taught at Wellesley, Princeton, the University of Virginia, and Stanford. His early work was primarily in standard areas of analytic philosophy such as the philosophy of mind, where, for example, he developed an important defense of eliminative materialism. In 1979, however, he published Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, which was both hailed and denounced as a fundamental critique of analytic philosophy. Both the praise and the abuse were often based on misconceptions, but there is no doubt that Rorty questioned fundamental presuppositions of many Anglo-American philosophers and showed affinities for Continental alternatives to analytic philosophy.
At root, however, Rorty’s position is neither analytic (except in its stylistic clarity) nor Continental (except in its cultural breadth). His view is, rather, pragmatic, a contemporary incarnation of the distinctively American philosophizing of James, Peirce, and Dewey. On Rorty’s reading, pragmatism involves a rejection of the representationalism that has dominated modern philosophy from Descartes through logical positivism. According to representationalism, we have direct access only to ideas that represent the world, not to the world itself. Philosophy has the privileged role of determining the criteria for judging that our representations are adequate to reality.
A main thrust of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is to discredit representationalism, first by showing how it has functioned as an unjustified presupposition in classical modern philosophers such as Descartes, Locke, and Kant, and second by showing how analytic philosophers such as Wilfrid Sellars and Quine have revealed the incoherence of representationalist assumptions in contemporary epistemology. Since, on Rorty’s view, representationalism defines the epistemological project of modern philosophy, its failure requires that we abandon this project and, with it, traditional pretensions to a privileged cognitive role for philosophy. Rorty sees no point in seeking a non-representationalist basis for the justification or the truth of our knowledge claims. It is enough to accept as justified beliefs those on which our epistemic community agrees and to use ‘true’ as an honorific term for beliefs that we see as ‘justified to the hilt.’
Rorty characterizes his positive position as ‘liberal ironism.’ His liberalism is of a standard sort, taking as its basic value the freedom of all individuals: first, their freedom from suffering, but then also freedom to form their lives with whatever values they find most compelling. Rorty distinguishes the ‘public sphere’ in which we all share the liberal commitment to universal freedom from the ‘private spheres’ in which we all work out our own specific conception of the good. His ironism reflects his realization that there is no grounding for public or private values other than our deep (but contingent) commitment to them and his appreciation of the multitude of private values that he does not himself happen to share. Rorty has emphasized the importance of literature and literary criticism – as opposed to traditional philosophy – for providing the citizens of a liberal society with appropriate sensitivities to the needs and values of others. See also ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY; CONTI- NENTAL PHILOSOPHY; PRAGMATISM ; QUINE ; SELLARS , WILFRI. G.G.