richard rorty RICHARD RORTY: 1931 - 2007
Philosopher couldn't be ignored
Diana Walsh, Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, June 11, 2007
Richard Rorty, one of the world's most influential cultural philosophers and a retired comparative literature professor at Stanford University, died Friday at his Palo Alto home from pancreatic cancer. He was 75.
For decades, Rorty waged a public and controversial challenge to various conventional philosophical thought. He published a landmark book in 1979 titled "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" that became one of the best-selling philosophical works of all time. In it, Rorty argued against the concept of representation that leading philosophical scholars had been focused on for centuries.
"The aim of the book is to undermine the reader's confidence in 'the mind' as something about which one should have a 'philosophical' view, in 'knowledge' as something about which there ought be a 'theory' and which has 'foundations,' and in 'philosophy' as it has been conceived since Kant," Rorty wrote in the book's introduction.
During an academic career that spanned more than four decades, he penned a vast body of work, publishing numerous books, essays and magazine and newspaper articles. He said once that he had spent his career trying to find out "what, if anything, philosophy was good for.''
His controversial views were harshly criticized, but they also drew support from advocates of pragmatic philosophy, and many believed he was the pre-eminent cultural philosopher of his time.
"He believed that his ideas stood on their own, independent of his public persona. He embraced his critics with reasoned responses, always ready to question his own assumptions,'' his son Jay Rorty said on Sunday.
Rorty's arrival at Stanford University in 1998 was seen as a major academic coup for the university. Rorty, whose teaching career began at Wellesley in 1958, spent most of his tenure at Princeton, where he taught from 1961 to 1982. He then moved to the University of Virginia from 1982 to 1998 before moving to Stanford. In 1981, he was one of the first recipients of a MacArthur genius grant.
Seth Lerer, who was chairman of Stanford University's comparative literature department at the time, said hiring Rorty was a "signal both within the Stanford community and to the community of scholars nationally that this university is very serious about the place of humanities and literary study."
Rorty's decision to teach in the comparative literature department and not in the philosophy department "reflected his belief that the dialectics of philosophy and literature are essentially part of the same conversation," according to a statement released by the university Sunday after his death.
"He was such an unbelievably captivating presence as a lecturer and as a writer, and he was a model citizen,'' said Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, a professor of literature at Stanford who helped bring Rorty to the university. "He always had these large classes of undergraduates. He had this huge, high opinion of the students here."
Although considered one of the world's brightest intellects, Rorty had a reserved manner in person, according to his son, but he was both kind and generous in his professional and personal life. For 20 years, Rorty sponsored a Fulbright scholar from abroad and always mailed copies of his books to anyone who asked for them.
"He admired people deeply, loved literature passionately and took deep pleasure in his work,'' Patricia Rorty said.
Rorty was born on Oct. 4, 1931, in New York City. He was just 15 years old when he entered the University of Chicago, earning a bachelor's degree in philosophy in 1949 and a master's degree in philosophy in 1952. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at Yale University.
Among his many awards, Rorty was slated to receive an honorary doctorate from Harvard University on June 7, but his failing health prevented him from traveling, his son said.
Rorty is survived by his wife, Mary Varney Rorty, a biomedical ethicist; daughter Patricia Rorty of Berkeley; and sons Jay Rorty of Santa Cruz and Kevin Rorty of Richmond, Va.
