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
the utopian social hope which sprang up in nineteenth-century Europe is still the noblest imaginative creation of which we have record.
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.
At 12, I knew that the point of being human was to spend one's life fighting social injustice.
The most important advance that the West has yet made is to develop a secularist moral tradition
There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.
What counts as rational argumentation is as historically determined and as context-dependent, as what counts as good French.
All human relations untouched by love take place in the dark
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.
If I had to lay bets, my bet would be that everything is going to go to hell, but, you know, what else have we got except hope?
Truth is simply a compliment paid to sentences seen to be paying their way.
My principal motive is the belief that we can still make admirable sense of our lives even if we cease to have... an ambition of transcendence.