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Richard Rorty Quotes

Richard McKay Rorty was 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 representation of a world whose existence remains wholly independent of that representation.

Rorty had a long and diverse academic career, including positions as Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia, and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. Among his most influential books are Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature , Consequences of Pragmatism , and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity .

Rorty saw the idea of knowledge as a "mirror of nature" as pervasive throughout the history of western philosophy. Against this approach, Rorty advocated for a novel form of American pragmatism in which scientific and philosophical methods form merely a set of contingent "vocabularies" which people abandon or adopt over time according to social conventions and usefulness. Rorty believed abandoning representationalist accounts of knowledge and language would lead to a state of mind he referred to as "ironism", in which people become completely aware of the contingency of their placement in history and of their philosophical vocabulary. Rorty tied this brand of philosophy to the notion of "social hope"; he believed that without the representationalist accounts, and without metaphors between the mind and the world, human society would behave more peacefully. He also emphasized the reasons why the interpretation of culture as conversation , constitutes the crucial concept of a "postphilosophical" culture determined to abandon representationalist accounts of traditional epistemology, incorporating American pragmatism with Darwinian naturalism. Wikipedia  

✵ 4. October 1931 – 8. June 2007
Richard Rorty photo

Works

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
Richard Rorty: 21   quotes 2   likes

Famous Richard Rorty Quotes

“Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative.”

Richard Rorty

Introduction to Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (1998).

“Almost as soon as I began to study philosophy, I was impressed by the way in which philosophical problems appeared, disappeared, or changed shape, as a result of new assumptions or vocabularies.”

Richard Rorty book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

Preface
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979)

“Citizens of a Jeffersonian democracy can be as religious or irreligious as they please as long as they are not “fanatical.” That is, they must abandon or modify opinion on matters of ultimate importance, the opinions that may hitherto have given sense and point to their lives, if these opinions entail public actions that cannot be justified to most of their fellow citizens.”

Richard Rorty

"The priority of democracy to philosophy"

“Nowadays, to say that we are clever animals is not to say something philosophical and pessimistic but something political and hopeful – namely, if we can work together, we can make ourselves into whatever we are clever and courageous enough to imagine ourselves becoming. This is to set aside Kant’s question “What is man?” and to substitute the question “What sort of world can we prepare for our great grandchildren?””

Richard Rorty

"Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality." Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (1998).

“Contemporary intellectuals have given up the Enlightenment assumption that religion, myth, and tradition can be opposed to something ahistorical, something common to all human beings qua human.”

Richard Rorty

"The priority of democracy to philosophy"

“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?”

Richard Rorty

"Richard Rorty Interviewed by Gideon Lewis-Kraus." The Believer, June 2003.

Richard Rorty Quotes about the world

“To abjure the notion of the “truly human” is to abjure the attempt to divinize the self as a replacement for a divinized world.”

Richard Rorty

Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), p. 35

“The encouragement of light-mindedness about traditional philosophical topics serves the same purposes as does the encouragement of light-mindedness about traditional theological topics. Like the rise of large market economies, the increase in literacy, the proliferation of artistic genres, and the insouciant pluralism of contemporary culture, such philosophical superficiality and light-mindedness helps along the disenchantment of the world. It helps make the world’s inhabitants more pragmatic, more tolerant, more liberal, more receptive to the appeal of instrumental rationality.”

Richard Rorty

"The priority of democracy to philosophy"

“Kripke tries to sober us up by denying that meaning determines reference. Rather, we name things by confronting them and baptising them, not by creating them out of a list of qualities. Names are not, pace Russell, shorthand for such lists. They are not abbreviations for descriptions, but (in Kripke’s coinage) ‘rigid designators’ – that is, they would name the same things in any possible world, including worlds in which their bearers did not have the properties we, in this world, use to identify them.”

Richard Rorty

Kripke versus Kant. Lrb.com, september 1980.

Richard Rorty Quotes about the trip

“On James's view, "true" resembles "good" or "rational" in being a normative notion, a compliment paid to sentences that seem to be paying their way and that fit with other sentences which are doing so.”

Richard Rorty

Introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism (1982)

“Rather, we heirs of Enlightenment think of enemies of liberal democracy like Nietzsche or Loyola as, to use Rawls’s word, “mad.” We do so because there is no way to see them as fellow citizens of our constitutional democracy, people whose life plans might, given ingenuity and good will, be fitted in with those of other citizens. They are crazy because the limits of sanity are set by what we can take seriously. This, in turn, is determined by our upbringing, our historical situation.”

Richard Rorty

"The priority of democracy to philosophy"

“As long as we try to project from the relative and conditioned to the absolute and unconditioned, we shall keep the pendulum swinging between dogmatism and skepticism. The only way to stop this increasingly tiresome pendulum swing is to change our conception of what philosophy is good for. But that is not something which will be accomplished by a few neat arguments. It will be accomplished, if it ever is, by a long, slow process of cultural change – that is to say, of change in common sense, changes in the intuitions available for being pumped up by philosophical arguments.”

Richard Rorty

Introduction to Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (1998).

Richard Rorty Quotes

“From Richard McKeon and Robert Brumsbaugh I learned to view the history of philosophy as a series, not of alternative solutions to the same problems, but of quite different sets of problems. From Rudolph Carnap and Carl Hempel I learned how pseudo-problems could be revealed as such by restarting them in the formal mode of speech. From Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss I learned how they could be so revealed by being translated into Whiteheadian or Hegelian terms.”

Richard Rorty book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

Preface
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979)

History , Problem , Learning

“It is no more evident that democratic institutions are to be measured by the sort of person they create than that they are to be measured against divine commands. … Even if the typical character types of liberal democracies are bland, calculating, petty, and unheroic, the prevalence of such people may be a reasonable price to pay for political freedom.”

Richard Rorty

"The priority of democracy to philosophy"

People , Democracy , Freedom , Personality

“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.”

Richard Rorty

"John Searle on Realism and Relativism." Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (1998).

Truth , Religion

“When the individual finds in her conscience beliefs that are relevant to public policy but incapable of the defense on the basis of beliefs common to her fellow citizens, she must sacrifice her conscience on the altar of public expediency.”

Richard Rorty

"The priority of democracy to philosophy"

“Complaints about the social irresponsibility of the intellectual typically concern the intellectual’s tendency to marginalize herself, to move out from one community by interior identification of herself with some other community—for example, another country or historical period. … It is not clear that those who thus marginalize themselves can be criticized for social irresponsibility. One cannot be irresponsible toward a community of which one does not think of oneself as a member. Otherwise runaway slaves and tunnelers under the Berlin Wall would be irresponsible.”

Richard Rorty

“Postmodernist bourgeois liberalism,” Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (Cambridge: 1991), p. 197

Communication , Thinking , Country

“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."”

Richard Rorty

Introduction to Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume I (1991).

Motivation , Sense

“Philosophers get attention only when they appear to be doing something sinister—corrupting the youth, undermining the foundations of civilization, sneering at all we hold dear. The rest of the time everybody assumes that they are hard at work somewhere down in the sub-basement, keeping those foundations in good repair. Nobody much cares what brand of intellectual duct tape is being used.”

Richard Rorty

"Philosophical Convictions." The Nation, June 14, 2004.

Youth , Appearance , Time

“… our maturation has consisted in the gradual realization that, if we can rely on one another, we need not rely on anything else. In religious terms, this is the Feuerbachian thesis that God is just a projection of the best, and sometimes the worst, of humanity. In philosophical terms, it is the thesis that anything that talk of objectivity can do to make our practices intelligible can be done equally well by talk of intersubjectivity.”

Richard Rorty

"John Searle on Realism and Relativism." Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (1998).

God , Intelligence

“I think of the course of human history as a long, swelling, increasingly polyphonic poem - a poem that leads up to nothing save itself. When the species is extinct, "human nature's total message" will not be a set of propositions, but a set of vocabularies - the more, and the more various, the better.”

Richard Rorty

Source: Response to Hartshorne in 'Rorty and Pragmatism, The Philosopher Responds to his Critics', p. 33

Thinking , History , Nature

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