Richard Rorty: biography of this American philosopher

Richard Rorty was an American philosopher, known for his interesting neopragmatic ideas about how human beings very we can hardly know the real world and can only describe it and assume that those descriptions are true or false.

With a rather murky but politically active childhood, Rorty became interested in philosophical issues and the great thinkers of his time at an early age.

Defending a sentimentalist education to promote respect and the application of human rights, Rorty has been equally acclaimed and criticized. Let's find out who this American thinker was through a biography of richard rorty.

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Brief biography of Richard Rorty

Richard McKay Rorty was born on October 4, 1931 in New York., USA. He grew up in a strongly activist family, his parents being James and Winifred Rorty, activists, writers and social democrats. In addition, his maternal grandfather was Walter Rauschenbursch, a key figure in the Social Gospel movement that At the beginning of the 20th century, he claimed that society reaches higher levels of equality and justice social.

Richard Rorty's adolescence was marked by the two nervous breakdowns his father suffered in later life. During the second, which occurred in the early 1960s, Rorty's father came to have claims of divine foreknowledge. Because of this the young Richard Rorty fell into a depression and in 1962 he began a six-year psychiatric analysis for obsessional neurosis.

It was at this time that, as an exercise in relaxation and calm, he began to take an interest in the beauty of New Jersey orchids, which he which he embodied in his autobiography "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids", where he embodied his desire to combine aesthetic beauty and justice social.

Academic life

Rorty entered the University of Chicago shortly before his 15th birthday, where he completed a philosophy degree. and he earned a master's degree studying under Richard McKeon.

He would later continue at Yale University to obtain his doctorate between 1952 and 1956, at which time he married Amélie Oksenberg, a professor at Harvard University, with whom he would have his son Jay Rorty in 1954.

After spending two years in the United States Army Rorty began teaching at Wellesley College for about three years, ending his work there in 1961. With the passing of a decade, he would end up divorcing Oksenberg and would remarry in 1972, this time with a bioethics thinker from Sanford University named Mary Varney with whom he would have her children Kevin and Patricia. This marriage was quite curious, since Richard Rorty was a strict atheist, while Mary was a practicing Mormon..

Richard Rorty would end up working as a philosophy professor at Princeton University for 21 years. In 1981 he would win a MacArthur Fellowship and in 1982 he would become a professor of humanities at the University of Virginia. More than a decade later he would change institutions again, going on to serve as a professor of comparative literature at Stanford University where he would spend the rest of his academic career..

Deepening in pragmatism

Taking a brief leap into the past, we will talk a little about Richard Rorty's doctoral thesis. This one, titled The Concept of Potentiality ("The Concept of Potentiality") consisted of a historical study of the concept, which was completed under the supervision of Paul Weiss. However, it would be in his first book The Linguistic Turn (1967) in which he would reaffirm his analytic mode, collecting classic essays on the linguistic turn in analytic philosophy.

Over time he would be attracted to the American philosophical movement of pragmatism., especially in the scriptures of John Dewey. In this current it is generally held that the meaning of a preposition is determined by its use in linguistic practice.

Taking this, Rorty combined the pragmatic vision of truth and various aspects of Ludwig Witgenstein's philosophy of language. in which he declares that meaning is a sociolinguistic product, and the sentences are not linked to the word in a direct relationship correspondence.

For Rorty the concept of truth was interpreted in an inappropriate way. The idea of ​​truth was not simply there, nor could it exist independently of the human mind. because sentences cannot exist nor can they be out there. It is true that the world exists, but the descriptions of the world we make do not.

According to Rorty, human beings we can only talk about the descriptions in terms of truth or falsehood, but not about the world itself or what it really is like since we cannot know it directly. Our senses influence how we see the world.

Last years

During the last 15 years of his life Rorty continued to publish texts, including four volumes in which several articles published throughout his life were compiled under the title of "Achieving Our Country” (1998). This book became a political manifesto, partially based on the writings of Dewey and Walt Whitman in which the idea of ​​a progressive and pragmatic left that should position itself against what Rorty considered anti-liberal positions was defended, anti-humanists and defeatists.

Richard Rorty was of the opinion that anti-humanist positions were well personified in the world of philosophy with figures such as Nietzsche, Heidegger and Foucault. In addition to focusing on these same positions, Rorty's later works gave special importance to the role of the Religion in Contemporary Life, Liberal Communities, Comparative Literature, and Philosophy as Politics cultural.

The last months of his life Richard Rorty spent worried, especially after receiving the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer that would end his life. Shortly before his death he wrote The Fire of Life, a text in which he meditates on his illness and how he managed to comfort himself with the art of poetry. Richard McKay Rorty would pass away on June 8, 2007 in the Californian city of Palo Alto at the age of 75, leaving behind a very intense philosophical work.

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His vision of human rights

Rorty's vision of human rights is based on the notion of sentimentality. He considered that throughout history humans have classified certain groups of people as inhuman or subhuman. Rorty was in favor of creating a global culture of human rights with the intention of stopping the violation of those rights through an education that advocated sentimentality.

The dehumanization of various groups for reasons such as race, socioeconomic origin, religion or language could be reduced by promoting empathy. Thus, if in the classroom children were taught to put themselves in the place of other people and understanding that some characteristics in concrete do not make people better or worse even if they are not the same it could create a truly peaceful society and more human.

Criticism of his philosophical proposals

Rorty is considered one of the most discussed and controversial contemporary philosophers, and his work has provoked all kinds of responses from other well-respected and well-known figures in his field, among them Júrgen Habermas, Hilary Putnam, Robert Brandom, Donald Davidson, John McDowell, Jacques Bouveresse and Daniel Dennett, among others.

Among the criticisms she has received we have that of Susan Haack, who criticizes him for his claim to be pragmatic. For her, the only link between Rorty's neopragmatism and pragmatism charles sanders peirce it's just the name. She considers Rorty's neo-pragmatism to be anti-philosophical and anti-intellectual and that her views on the ideas of truth were somewhat superficial.

Another of the points for which he was criticized was his ideology and his vision apparently in favor of social justice. He despite being known for his liberal vision and his moral and political philosophy he was also attacked by the left, who considered that his proposals for social justice and humanitarianism were insufficient. He was also criticized for his idea about the truth, since in his opinion that we can only consider true or false the descriptions of the world and we will not be able to know the world as it really is, because it is impossible to know, it has been considered as a criticism of the idea of science.

Bibliographic references:

• Marchetti, G. (2003). Interview with Richard Rorty. Philosophy Now, 43.
• Ramberg, B. (2007). Richard Rorty: Biographical Sketch. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.