Richard Rorty
Richard Rorty
Richard McKay Rortywas an American philosopher. Educated at the University of Chicago and Yale University, he had strong interests and training in both the history of philosophy and contemporary analytic philosophy, the latter of which came to comprise the main focus of his work at Princeton University in the 1960s. He subsequently came to reject the tradition of philosophy according to which knowledge involves correct representationof a world whose existence remains wholly independent of that representation. Rorty had a long...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth4 October 1931
CountryUnited States of America
Richard Rorty quotes about
Always strive to excel, but only on weekends.
Truth is a property of sentences, since sentences are dependent for their existence upon vocabularies, and since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths.
Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.
You read the pragmatists and all you know is: not Descartes, not Kant, not Plato. It's like aspirin. You can't use aspirin to give yourself power, you take it to get rid of headaches. In that way, pragmatism is a philosophical therapy. It helps you stop asking the unhelpful questions.
I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends.
We are equal inhabitants of a paradise of individuals in which everybody has the right to be understood.
Freedom is the recognition of contingency.
Truthfulness under oath is, by now, a matter of our civic religion, our relation to our fellow citizens rather than our relation to a nonhuman power.