Richard Rorty: Biography Of This American Philosopher
Richard Rorty was an American philosopher, known for his interesting neopragmatic ideas about how human beings can hardly know the real world and can only describe it and assume that these descriptions are true or false.
With a rather turbulent but politically active childhood, Rorty became interested in philosophical issues and the great thinkers of his time at an early age.
Advocating a sentimentalist education to encourage respect and application of human rights, Rorty has been acclaimed and criticized in equal measure. Let’s discover who this American thinker was through a biography of Richard Rorty
Richard McKay Rorty was born on October 4, 1931 in New York, USA. She grew up in a strongly activist family, his parents James and Winifred Rorty being activists, writers and social democrats. Furthermore, her maternal grandfather was Walter Rauschenbursch, a key figure in the Social Gospel movement that at the beginning of the 20th century sought for society to reach greater levels of equality and social justice.
Richard Rorty’s adolescence was marked by the two nervous breakdowns that his father suffered in later life. During the second, which occurred in the early 1960s, Rorty’s father came to have claims of divine prescience. Because of this The young Richard Rorty fell into depression and in 1962 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 become interested in the beauty of New Jersey orchids, which he captured in his autobiography “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” where he expressed his desire to combine beauty aesthetics and social justice.
Academic life
Rorty entered the University of Chicago shortly before turning 15, where he completed his degree in philosophy and earned a master’s degree studying under Richard McKeon.
He would then continue at Yale University to obtain his doctorate between 1952 and 1956, during 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. Over a decade, he divorced Oksenberg and remarried in 1972. this time with a bioethics thinker from Sanford University named Mary Varney with whom he would have his 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, He became a professor of comparative literature at Stanford University, where he would spend the rest of his academic career
Deepening pragmatism
Briefly jumping 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 analytical mode, compiling classic essays about the linguistic turn in analytical philosophy.
As time went by he would feel attracted to the American philosophical movement of pragmatism, especially in the writings 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 view of truth and several aspects of Ludwig Witgenstein’s philosophy of language in which he declares that meaning is a sociolinguistic product, and sentences are not linked to the word in a relationship. of direct 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 phrases cannot exist nor 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 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 the way we see the world.
Last years
During the last 15 years of his life, Rorty continued to publish texts, including four volumes that compiled various articles published throughout his life under the title “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 was defended that should position itself against what Rorty considered illiberal positions anti-humanists and defeatists.
Richard Rorty believed 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 religion in contemporary life, liberal communities, comparative literature, and philosophy as cultural politics.
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 about his illness and how he managed to comfort himself with the art of poetry Richard McKay Rorty would die on June 8, 2007 in the Californian city of Palo Alto at the age of 75, leaving behind a very intense philosophical work.
Your 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 due to issues 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 other people’s shoes and understanding that specific characteristics do not make people better or worse even if they are not equal, a truly peaceful and more humane society could be created. .
Criticisms of his philosophical proposals
Rorty is considered one of the most discussed and controversial contemporary philosophers and his works have provoked all kinds of responses from other highly respected and well-known figures in his field, including Júrgen Habermas, Hilary Putnam, Robert Brandom, Donald Davidson, John McDowell, Jacques Bouveresse and Daniel Dennett, among others.
Among the criticisms it 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 Charles Sanders Peirce’s pragmatism is simply the name. She considers that Rorty’s neopragmatism is anti-philosophical and anti-intellectual and that her views on ideas of truth were somewhat superficial.
Another point for which he was criticized was his ideology and his vision apparently in favor of social justice. He is 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 by believing that we can only consider descriptions of the world true or false and we will not be able to know the world as it really is, because it is impossible to know, it has been considered a criticism of the idea. of Science.
