Richard Rorty, American Philosopher, 75
Pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty died on Friday, according to a report by Stanford University. He was 75 years of age and succumbed to complications relating to pancreatic cancer.
Born in New York City, Rorty studied at the University of Chicago where he earned his bachelors in 1949 and at Yale University, where he earned a PhD in 1956.
After serving in the Army, he taught at Wellesley College before joining the faculty at Princeton in 1960. In 1982, he became a professor of humanities at the University of Virginia, before leaving for Stanford University where he was a member of the comparative literature department.
Although his early work such as "The Linguistic Turn" (1967) was influenced by analytic philosophy, Rorty went on to embrace pragmatism in the tradition of John Dewey and William James. Those on the right charged him with moral relativism, while meanwhile he defended a pragmatic American liberalism from its European poststructuralist critics.
Among his most widely known books were "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" (1979 and "Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity" (1989).
In his later years, he predicted the rise of a "literary culture," whereby novels and poetry would supersede as a source for ethics philosophical and religious texts, which for him held no privileged, higher claim to truth.
"He was a courageous thinker who contributed greatly to our public culture and it is a tremendous loss," said a professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago, Martha Nussbaum.
