Richard Rorty: biography of this American philosopher.

A summary of the life of Richard Rorty, American philosopher of the neopragmatist current.

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

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

Advocating a sentimentalist education to encourage respect and enforcement of human rights, Rorty has been acclaimed and criticized in equal parts. Let's find out who this American thinker was through a biography of Richard Rorty.

Brief biography of Richard Rorty

Richard McKay Rorty was born on October 4, 1931 in New York, USA.New York, United States. 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 in the early twentieth century sought to bring society to greater levels of equality and social justice.

Richard Rorty's adolescence was marked by the two nervous breakdowns his father suffered in his later life. During the second, which occurred in the early 1960s, Rorty's father came to have clamors of divine prescience. Because of this the young Richard Rorty fell into a 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 became interested in the beauty of the orchids of New Jersey, which he captured in his autobiography "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids", where he expressed his desire to combine aesthetic beauty and social justice.

Academic life

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

He would then continue on to Yale University to earn a Ph.D. 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 U.S. Army, Rorty began teaching at Wellesley College for about three years, finishing his work there in 1961. Within a decade he would eventually divorce Oksenberg and remarry in 1972, this time to a bioethics thinker at Sanford University named Mary Varney, with whom he would have their 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 professor of philosophy at Princeton University for 21 years. In 1981 he would win a MacArthur Fellowship and in 1982 become a professor of humanities at the University of Virginia. More than a decade later he would again change institutions, becoming a professor of comparative literature at Stanford University where he would spend the rest of his academic career..

Deepening Pragmatism

Taking a brief leap into the past, we now turn to Richard Rorty's doctoral dissertation, titled 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 reassert himself in his analytic mode, compiling classic essays on the linguistic turn in analytic philosophy.

With the passage of time he would become attracted to the American philosophical movement of pragmatismespecially 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 with various aspects of Ludwig Witgenstein's philosophy of language in which he states that meaning is a sociolinguistic product, and sentences are not linked to words in a relation 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 sentences cannot exist, nor can they be out there. It is true that the world exists, but the descriptions of the world that we make do not.

According to Rorty, human beings can only speak of descriptions in terms of truth or falsity, but not of the world itself and what it is really like, since we cannot know it in any way we can't know. since we cannot know it directly. Our senses influence the way we see the world.

Recent years

During the last 15 years of his life Rorty continued to publish texts, including four volumes compiling various articles published throughout his life under the title "Achieving Our Country" (1998). This book became a political manifesto, partly based on the writings of Dewey and Walt Whitman in which he defended the idea of a progressive and pragmatic left that should position itself against what Rorty considered illiberal, anti-humanist and defeatist positions.anti-humanist and defeatist positions.

Richard Rorty was of the opinion that the 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 work gave special importance to the role of religion in contemporary life, liberal communities, comparative literature, and philosophy as cultural politics.

Richard Rorty spent the last months of his life preoccupied, 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 was able to comfort himself with the art of poetry. Richard McKay Rorty died on June 8, 2007 in the Californian city of Palo Alto at the age of 75, leaving behind a very intense philosophical work.

His vision of human rights

Rorty's vision of human rights is based on the notion of sentimentality.. He considered that throughout history we 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 sentimentalism.

The dehumanization of various groups based on race, socioeconomic origin, religion or language could be reduced through the promotion of empathy. Thus, if children were taught in the classroom to put themselves in the place of other people and to understand that certain characteristics do not make people better or worse, even if they are not equal, a truly peaceful and more humane society could be created.

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, including Jürgen Habermas, Hilary Putnam, Robert Brandom, Donald Davidson, John McDowell, Jacques Bouveresse and Daniel Dennett, among others.

Among the criticisms it has received is that of Susan Haack, who criticizes him for his claim to be a pragmatist.. For her the only link between Rorty's neopragmatism and Charles Sanders Peirce's pragmatism is simply the name. She considers Rorty's neopragmatism to be anti-philosophical and anti-intellectual and that his views about ideas of truth were somewhat superficial.

Another point for which he was criticized was his ideology and his apparently pro-social justice views. Although he was known for his liberal outlook and his moral and political philosophy was also attacked by the left, who considered his proposals for social justice and humanitarianism to be insufficient.. He was also criticized for his idea of truth, since his opinion that we can only consider true or false the descriptions of the world and that we cannot know the world as it really is, because it is impossible to know, has been considered as a criticism to the idea of science.

Bibliographical references:

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