Richard McKay Rorty (October 4, 1931 – June 8, 2007) was an American philosopher. He 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. His complex intellectual background gave him a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the traditional analytic philosophy, which he would later famously reject in favor of his own brand of pragmatism.

The philosophical program he developed included a rejection of a representationalist account of knowledge, that is, "mirror of nature", which he reviewed as a holdover from Plato and pervasive throughout the history of western philosophy. In response to these visual theorists, which he drew as embodied by modern analytic philosophy, Rorty advocated for a novel form of American pragmatism, sometimes called neopragmatism, in which scientific and philosophical methods are merely a set of contingent "vocabularies" which were abandoned or adopted over time according to social conventions and usefulness.

Abandoning representationalist accounts of knowledge and language, Rorty believed, would lead to a state of mind he referred to as "ironism", in which people are completely aware of the contingency of their placement in history and of their philosophical vocabulary. For Rorty, this brand of philosophy is always tied to the notion of "social hope", that without the representation accounts and without metaphors between the mind and the world, human society would be more peaceful. He emphasized the reasons why Gadamer's brainchild of Bildung mentioned would be the crucial concept of a "postphilosophical" culture that had been determined to abandon the representationalist account of the traditional epistemology, incorporating American pragmatist naturalism that considers the natural sciences as an advance towards liberalism. His best known books are Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989).

Biography[link]

Richard Rorty was born October 4, 1931, in New York City.^[1] His parents, James and Winifred Rorty, were activists, writers and social democrats. His maternal grandfather, Walter Rauschenbusch, was a central figure in the Social Gospel movement of the early 20th century.^[2] His father experienced two nervous breakdowns in his later life. The second breakdown which he had in the early 1960s was more serious and "included claims to divine prescience"^[3]. Consequently Richard Rorty fell into depression as a teenager and began a six-year psychiatric analysis for obsessional neurosis in 1962.^[4] Rorty wrote about the beauty of rural New Jersey orchids in his short autobiography, "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids." His colleague Jürgen Habermas's obituary for Rorty points out that Rorty's contrasting childhood experiences, such as beautiful orchids versus reading a book in his parents' house that defended Leon Trotsky against Stalin, created an early interest in philosophy. He describes Rorty as an ironist:

"Nothing is sacred to Rorty the ironist. Asked at the end of his life about the 'holy', the strict atheist answered with words reminiscent of the young Hegel: 'My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law."^[5]

Rorty enrolled at the University of Chicago shortly before turning 15, where he received a bachelor's and a master's degree in philosophy (studying under Leo Strauss)^[6][7] , continuing at Yale University for a PhD in philosophy (1952–1956).^[8] He married another academic, Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (Harvard University professor), in 1954, with whom he had a son, Jay. After two years in the United States Army, he taught at Wellesley College for three years until 1961.^[9] Rorty divorced his wife and then married Stanford University bioethicist Mary Varney Rorty in 1972. They had two children, Kevin and Patricia. While Richard Rorty was a "strict atheist" (Habermas)^[10], Mary Varney Rorty was a "practicing Mormon"^[11].

Rorty was a professor of philosophy at Princeton University for 21 years.^[9] In 1981, he was a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, commonly known as the Genius Award, in its first year of awarding, and in 1982 he became Kenan Professor of the Humanities at the University Of Virginia.^[12] In 1997 Rorty became professor emeritus of comparative literature (and philosophy, by courtesy), at Stanford University.^[12] During this period he was especially popular, and once quipped that he had been assigned to the position of "transitory professor of trendy studies".^[13]

Rorty's doctoral dissertation, "The Concept of Potentiality", and his first book (as editor), The Linguistic Turn (1967), were firmly in the prevailing analytic mode. However, he gradually became acquainted with the American philosophical movement known as pragmatism, particularly the writings of John Dewey. The noteworthy work being done by analytic philosophers such as W.V.O. Quine and Wilfrid Sellars caused significant shifts in his thinking, which were reflected in his next book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979).

Pragmatists generally hold that the meaning of a proposition is determined by its use in linguistic practice. Rorty combined pragmatism about truth and other matters with a later Wittgensteinian philosophy of language which declares that meaning is a social-linguistic product, and sentences do not 'link up' with the world in a correspondence relation. Rorty wrote in his Contingency, irony, and solidarity (1989):

"Truth cannot be out there—cannot exist independently of the human mind—because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own—unaided by the describing activities of humans—cannot.”(5)

Views like this led Rorty to question many of philosophy's most basic assumptions — and have also led to him being apprehended as a postmodern/deconstructionist philosopher. Indeed, from the late 1980s through the 1990s, Rorty focused on the continental philosophical tradition, examining the works of Friederich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida. His work from this period included Contingency, irony, and solidarity, Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers (1991) and Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers (1998). The latter two works attempt to bridge the dichotomy between analytic and continental philosophy by claiming that the two traditions complement rather than oppose each other.

According to Rorty, analytic philosophy may not have lived up to its pretensions and may not have solved the puzzles it thought it had. Yet such philosophy, in the process of finding reasons for putting those pretensions and puzzles aside, helped earn itself an important place in the history of ideas. By giving up on the quest for apodicticity and finality that Husserl shared with Carnap and Russell, and by finding new reasons for thinking that such quest will never succeed, analytic philosophy cleared a path that leads past scientism, just as the German idealists cleared a path that led around empiricism.

Richard Rorty with the Iranian writer and activist Akbar Ganji.

In the last fifteen years of his life, Rorty continued to publish voluminously, including four volumes of philosophical papers, Achieving Our Country (1998), a political manifesto partly based on readings of Dewey and Walt Whitman in which he defended the idea of a progressive, pragmatic left against what he feels are defeatist, anti-liberal, anti-humanist positions espoused by the critical left and continental school, personified by figures like Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault. Such theorists were also guilty of an "inverted Platonism" in which they attempted to craft over-arching, metaphysical, "sublime" philosophies—which in fact contradicted their core claims to be ironist and contingent. Rorty's last works focused on the place of religion in contemporary life, liberal communities, and philosophy as "cultural politics".

Shortly before his death, he wrote a piece called "The Fire of Life", (published in the November 2007 issue of Poetry magazine),^[14] in which he meditates on his diagnosis and the comfort of poetry. He concludes, "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."

On June 8, 2007, Rorty died in his home from pancreatic cancer.^[8][12][15]

Major works[link]

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature[link]

In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Rorty argues that the central problems of modern epistemology depend upon a picture of the mind as trying to faithfully represent (or "mirror") a mind-independent, external reality. If we give up this metaphor, then the entire enterprise of foundationalist epistemology is misguided. A foundationalist believes that in order to avoid the regress inherent in claiming that all beliefs are justified by other beliefs, some beliefs must be self-justifying and form the foundations to all knowledge.

There were two senses of "foundationalism" criticized in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. In the epistemological sense, Rorty criticized the attempt to justify knowledge claims by tracing them to a set of foundations (e.g., self-evident premises or noninferential sensations); more broadly, he criticized the claim of philosophy to function foundationally within a culture. The former argument draws on Sellars's critique of the idea that there is a "given" in sensory perception, in combination with Quine's critique of the distinction between analytic sentences (sentences which are true solely in virtue of what they mean) and synthetic sentences (sentences made true by the world). Each critique, taken alone, provides a problem for a conception of how philosophy ought to proceed, yet leaves enough of the tradition intact to proceed with its former aspirations. Combined, Rorty claimed, the two critiques are devastating. With no privileged insight into the structure of belief and no privileged realm of truths of meaning, we have, instead, knowledge as those beliefs that pay their way. The only worthwhile description of the actual process of inquiry, Rorty claimed, was a Kuhnian account of the standard phases of the progress of disciplines, oscillating through normal and abnormal periods, between routine problem-solving and intellectual crises.

After eliminating foundationalism, Rorty argues that one of the few roles left for a philosopher is to act as an intellectual gadfly, attempting to induce a revolutionary break with previous practice, a role that Rorty was happy to take on himself. Rorty suggests that each generation tries to subject all disciplines to the model that the most successful discipline of the day employs. In Rorty's view, the success of modern science has led academics in philosophy and the humanities to mistakenly imitate scientific methods. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature popularized and extended ideas of Wilfrid Sellars (the critique of the Myth of the given) and W. V. O. Quine (the critique of the analytic-synthetic distinction) and others who advocate the Wittgensteinian doctrine of "dissolving" rather than solving philosophical problems.

Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity[link]

In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), Rorty abandons specifically analytic modes of explication in favor of narrative pastiche in order to develop an alternative conceptual vocabulary to that of the "Platonists" he rejects. This schema is based on the belief that there is no worthwhile theory of truth, aside from a boring, non-epistemic semantic one (as Donald Davidson developed out of the work of Tarski). Rorty suggests that the task of philosophy should be distinguished along public and private lines. Private philosophers, who provide one with greater abilities to (re)create oneself, a view adapted from Nietzsche and which Rorty also identifies with the novels of Proust and Nabokov, should not be expected to help with public problems. For a public philosophy, one might turn to Rawls or Habermas.

This book also marks his first attempt to specifically articulate a political vision consistent with his philosophy, the vision of a diverse community bound together by opposition to cruelty, and not by abstract ideas such as 'justice' or 'common humanity,' policed by the separation of the public and private realms of life.

In this book, Rorty introduces the terminology of Ironism, which he uses to describe his mindset and his philosophy.

Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth[link]

Amongst the essays in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1 (1990), is "The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy," in which Rorty defends Rawls against communitarian critics and argues that personal ideals of perfection and standards of truth were no more needed in politics than a state religion. He sees Rawls' concept of reflective equilibrium as a more appropriate way of conceptualizing political decision-making in modern liberal democracies.

Essays on Heidegger and Others[link]

In this text, Rorty focuses primarily on the continental philosophers Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. He argues that these European "post-Nietzscheans" share much with American pragmatists, in that they critique metaphysics and reject the correspondence theory of truth. When discussing Derrida, Rorty claims that Derrida is most useful when viewed as a funny writer who attempted to circumvent the Western philosophical tradition, rather than the inventor of a philosophical (or literary) "method." In this vein, Rorty criticizes Derrida's followers like Paul de Man for taking deconstructive literary theory too seriously.

Achieving Our Country[link]

In Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (1997), Rorty differentiates between what he sees as the two sides of the Left, a cultural Left and a progressive Left. He criticizes the cultural Left, which is exemplified by post-structuralists such as Michel Foucault and postmodernists such as Jean-François Lyotard, for offering critiques of society, but no alternatives (or alternatives that are so vague and general as to be abdications). Although these intellectuals make insightful claims about the ills of society, Rorty suggests that they provide no alternatives and even occasionally deny the possibility of progress. On the other hand, the progressive Left, exemplified for Rorty by the pragmatist John Dewey, Whitman and James Baldwin, makes hope for a better future its priority. Without hope, Rorty argues, change is spiritually inconceivable and the cultural Left has begun to breed cynicism. Rorty sees the progressive Left as acting in the philosophical spirit of pragmatism.

On human rights[link]

Rorty's notion of human rights is grounded on the notion of sentimentality. He contended that throughout history humans have devised various means of construing certain groups of individuals as inhuman or subhuman. Thinking in rationalist (foundationalist) terms will not solve this problem, he claimed. Rorty advocated the creation of a culture of global human rights in order to stop violations from happening through a sentimental education. He argued that we should create a sense of empathy or teach empathy to others so as to understand others' suffering.

Reception and criticism[link]

Rorty is one of the most widely discussed and most controversial of philosophers of recent years,^[16] and his works have provoked thoughtful responses from many well-respected philosophers. In Robert Brandom's anthology, entitled Rorty and His Critics, for example, Rorty's philosophy is discussed by Donald Davidson, Jürgen Habermas, Hilary Putnam, John McDowell, Jacques Bouveresse, and Daniel Dennett, among others.^[17]

John McDowell is strongly influenced by Rorty, particularly by Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979).^[18] In continental philosophy, authors such as Jürgen Habermas, Gianni Vattimo, Jacques Derrida, Albrecht Wellmer, Hans Joas, Chantal Mouffe, Simon Critchley, Esa Saarinen and Mike Sandbothe are influenced in different ways by Rorty's thinking.

Although Rorty was a hardened liberal, his political and moral philosophies have been attacked from the Left, some of whom believe them to be insufficient frameworks for social justice.^[19] Rorty was also criticized by others for his rejection of the idea that science can depict the world.^[20] One criticism, especially of Contingency, irony, and solidarity is that Rorty's philosophical 'hero', the ironist, is an elitist figure.^[21] Rorty claims that the majority of people would be "commonsensically nominalist and historicist" but not ironist. These people would combine an ongoing attention to the particular as opposed to the transcendent (nominalism), with an awareness of their place in a continuum of contingent lived experience alongside other individuals (historicist), without necessarily having continual doubts about the resulting worldview as the ironist does. An ironist is someone who: 1) "has radical and continuing doubts about their final vocabulary"; 2) "realizes that argument phrased in their vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts"; and 3) "does not think their vocabulary is closer to reality than others" (all 73, Contingency, irony, and solidarity).

Rorty often draws on a broad range of other philosophers to support his views, and his interpretation of their works has been contested.^[22] Since Rorty is working from a tradition of re-interpretation, he remains uninterested in 'accurately' portraying other thinkers, but rather in utilizing their work in the same way a literary critic might use a novel. His essay "The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres" is a thorough description of how he treats the greats in the history of philosophy.

In Contingency, irony, and solidarity, Rorty attempts to disarm those who criticize his writings by arguing that their philosophical criticisms are made using axioms that are explicitly rejected within Rorty's own philosophy.^[23] For instance, Rorty defines allegations of irrationality as affirmations of vernacular "otherness", and so -- Rorty claims -- accusations of irrationality can be expected during any argument and must simply be brushed aside.^[24]

Select bibliography[link]

• Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. ISBN
• Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. ISBN
• (ed. with J. B. Schneewind and Quentin Skinner) Philosophy in History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
• Contingency, irony, and solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ISBN 978-0-521-35381-6
• Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ISBN
• Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ISBN
• Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. ISBN
• Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ISBN
• Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin, 2000. ISBN
• Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies: A Conversation with Richard Rorty. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2002. ISBN
• The Future of Religion with Gianni Vattimo Ed. Santiago Zabala. Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2005. ISBN
• Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers IV. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

See also[link]

• Anti-foundationalism
• Contributions to liberal theory
• Deconstruction-and-religion
• List of American philosophers
• List of thinkers influenced by deconstruction

Notes[link]

Further reading[link]

Books[link]

• Richard Rorty: Critical Assessments (4 vols) / James Tartaglia, 2009
• The domestication of Derrida: Rorty, pragmatism and deconstruction / Lorenzo Fabbri, 2008
• Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher / Neil Gross, 2008
• Rorty and the Mirror of Nature / James Tartaglia, 2007
• Richard Rorty: Pragmatism and Political Liberalism / Michael Bacon, 2007
• Richard Rorty: politics and vision / Christopher Voparil, 2006
• Heidegger, Rorty, and the Eastern thinkers : a hermeneutics of cross-cultural understanding / Wei Zhang, 2006
• Richard Rorty: his philosophy under discussion / Andreas Vieth, 2005
• The concept of Rortyan Christian ironism / Odom, Barton Page, 2005
• The Pragmatic Turn in Philosophy: Contemporary Engagement between Analytic and Continental Thought / Eds. William Egginton and Mike Sandbothe, 2005
• Richard Rorty / Charles B Guignon., 2003
• Between Rorty and MacIntyre: A Kierkegaardian account of irony and moral commitment / Frazier, Bradley., 2003
• Richard Rorty's American faith / Taub, Gad Shmuel., 2003
• The ethical ironist: Kierkegaard, Rorty, and the educational quest / Rohrer, Patricia Jean., 2003
• Doing philosophy as a way to individuation: Reading Rorty and Cavell / Kwak, Duck-Joo., 2003
• Richard Rorty / Alan R Malachowski., 2002
• Richard Rorty: critical dialogues / Matthew Festenstein., 2001
• Richard Rorty: education, philosophy, and politics / Michael Peters., 2001
• Religion and the Demise of Liberal Rationalism / Judd Owen., 2001
• Rorty and his critics / Robert Brandom., 2000
• On Rorty / Richard Rumana., 2000
• Philosophy and freedom : Derrida, Rorty, Habermas, Foucault / John McCumber., 2000
• A pragmatist's progress?: Richard Rorty and American intellectual history / John Pettegrew., 2000
• Problems of the modern self: Reflections on Rorty, Taylor, Nietzsche, and Foucault / Dudrick, David Francis., 2000
• The last conceptual revolution: a critique of Richard Rorty's political philosophy / Eric Gander., 1999
• Richard Rorty's politics: liberalism at the end of the American century/Markar Melkonian., 1999
• Cultural otherness : correspondence with Richard Rorty / Anindita Niyogi Balslev., 1999
• The work of friendship : Rorty, his critics, and the project of solidarity / Dianne Rothleder., 1999
• Pragmatism and political theory : from Dewey to Rorty / Matthew Festenstein., 1997
• Debating the state of philosophy: Habermas, Rorty, and Kolakowski / Józef Niznik., 1996
• For the love of perfection : Richard Rorty and liberal education / René Vincente Arcilla., 1995
• Rorty & pragmatism: the philosopher responds to his critics / Herman J Saatkamp., 1995
• Richard Rorty : prophet and poet of the new pragmatism / David L Hall., 1994
• Without God or his doubles : realism, relativism, and Rorty / D Vaden House., 1994
• Beyond postmodern politics : Lyotard, Rorty, Foucault / Honi Fern Haber., 1994
• After the demise of the tradition : Rorty, critical theory, and the fate of philosophy/ Kai Nielsen., 1991
• Reading Rorty: critical responses to Philosophy and the mirror of nature (and beyond) / Alan R Malachowski., 1990
• Rorty's humanistic pragmatism : philosophy democratized / Konstantin Kolenda., 1990
• Pragmatist Aesthetics / Richard Shusterman. Rowman Littlefield 2000. (esp. Chapter 9: 236-261)

Articles[link]

• Rorty R / "The Fire of Life" POETRY / NOV 2007 [available online]

• Lynch S / On Richard Rorty's use of the distinction between the private and the public

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES 15 (1): 97-120 MAR 2007

• Dombrowski DA / Rorty versus Hartshorne, or, poetry versus metaphysics (Richard Rorty, Charles Hartshorne)

METAPHILOSOPHY 38 (1): 88-110 JAN 2007

• Arriaga M / Richard Rorty's anti-foundationalism and traditional philosophy's claim of social relevance

INTERNATIONAL PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 45 (4): 467-482 DEC 2005

• Barthold LS / How hermeneutical is he? A gadamerian analysis of Richard Rorty

PHILOSOPHY TODAY 49 (3): 236-244 FAL 2005

• Stieb JA / Rorty on realism and constructivism

METAPHILOSOPHY 36 (3): 272-294 APR 2005

• Flaherty J / Rorty, religious beliefs, and pragmatism

INTERNATIONAL PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY 45 (2): 175-185 JUN 2005

• Smith NH / Rorty on religion and hope

INQUIRY-AN INTERDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 48 (1): 76-98 FEB 2005

• Santos RJ / Richard Rorty's philosophy of social hope

PHILOSOPHY TODAY 47 (4): 431-440 WIN 2003

• Miller CB / Rorty and moral relativism

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 10 (3): 354-374 DEC 2002

• Abrams JJ / Aesthetics of self-fashioning and cosmopolitanism - Foucault and Rorty on the art of living

PHILOSOPHY TODAY 46 (2): 185-192 SUM 2002

• Margolis J / Dewey's and Rorty's opposed pragmatisms

TRANSACTIONS OF THE CHARLES S PEIRCE SOCIETY 38 (1-2): 117-135 WIN-SPR 2002

• Talisse RB / A pragmatist critique of Richard Rorty's hopeless politics

SOUTHERN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 39 (4): 611-626 WIN 2001

• Picardi E / Rorty, Sorge and truth

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES 9 (3): 431-439 Sp. Iss. SI AUG 2001

• McDermid DJ / Does epistemology rest on a mistake? Understanding Rorty on scepticism

CRITICA-REVISTA HISPANOAMERICANA DE FILOSOFIA 32 (96): 3-42 DEC 2000

• Owens J / The obligations of irony: Rorty on irony, autonomy, and contingency

REVIEW OF METAPHYSICS 54 (1): 27-41 SEP 2000

• Margolis J / Richard Rorty: Philosophy by other means

METAPHILOSOPHY 31 (5): 529-546 OCT 2000

• Kompridis N / So we need something else for reason to mean

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES 8 (3): 271-295 OCT 2000

• Cohen AJ / On Universalism: Commuitarians, Rorty, and ('Objectivist') 'liberal metaphysicians'

SOUTHERN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 38 (1): 39-75 SPR 2000

• Rorty R / Response to Randall Peerenboom ('Rorty and the China Challenge')

PHILOSOPHY EAST & WEST 50 (1): 90-91 JAN 2000

• Peerenboom R / The limits of irony: Rorty and the China challenge

PHILOSOPHY EAST & WEST 50 (1): 56-89 JAN 2000

• Stow, S. / The Return of Charles Kinbote: Nabokov on Rorty

PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE 23: 65-77 1999

External links[link]

This article's use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive or inappropriate external links, and converting useful links where appropriate into footnote references. (June 2011)

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Richard Rorty

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry
• Rorty audio, "Dewey and Posner on Pragmatism and Moral Progress," University of Chicago Law School, April 14, 2006.
• Rorty audio, "National Pride, National Shame," panel discussion on Achieving Our Country with responses from Angela Davis, Gordon Wood and Kathleen Sullivan, Jan. 13, 2003.
• PhilWeb's entry for Richard Rorty An exhaustive compilation of on-line links and off-line sources.
• Richard Rorty; el pragmatismo y la filosofía como género literario by Adolfo Vasquez Rocca Ph.D. (Spanish)
• Introduction to Rorty's Consequences of Pragmatism
• How Richard Rorty Found Religion in First Things
• Joshing Richard Rorty in First Things
• Radio Interview on Entitled Opinions
• Short film about Richard Rorty
• New York Times Magazine profile (4600 words), "Richard Rorty: Philosopher-King", December 2, 1990 (no link available)

Essays and Articles by Rorty[link]

• Rorty's thoughts on dying, Poetry magazine, November 2007.
• Rorty essay, possibly his last published, "A rejoinder to Béla Egyed," March 2007, reprinted in "Kritika & Kontext," May 2007.
• Rorty review of Bernard Williams's Truth and Truthfulness, LRB, Oct. 31, 2002.
• Rorty essays published in Dissent (magazine)
• Rorty essay, "Democracy and philosophy", originally delivered April 2004, in Tehran, reprinted in Kritika & Kontext, May 2007.
• Rorty on President Clinton's legacy, New York Times op-ed, March 6, 2000.
• Rorty essay, "Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism", 1998.
• Rorty on Oliver North, New York Times op-ed, October 13, 1994.
• Rorty essay, "Feminism and Pragmatism", the Tanner Lecture on Human Values, December 7, 1990.

Book Reviews by Rorty[link]

• Rorty book reviews published at Notre Dame Philosophical Review.
• Rorty on Freud, NYT Book Review, October 22, 2000.
• Rorty on papal history, NYT Book Review, June 11, 2000.
• Rorty review of Marc Hauser's Moral Minds, NYT Book Review, Aug. 27, 2006.
• Rorty review of Scott Soames's history of analytic philosophy, London Review of Books, Jan. 20, 2005.
• Rorty disagrees with Andrew Delbanco, NYT Book Review, Nov. 7, 1999.

Interviews[link]

• Rorty audio, informative interview by Prof. Robert P. Harrison, Nov. 22, 2005.
• Rorty interview, Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies, conducted by Derek Nystrom & Kent Puckett, Prickly Paradigm Press, Sept. 1998.
• Rorty interview, The Atlantic Monthly, April 23, 1998.
• Rorty interview, Flash Art Magazine, Nov/Dec. 1993.

Obituaries, Eulogies and Memorials[link]

• Rorty Memorial Lecture by Jürgen Habermas, Stanford University, Nov. 2, 2007.
• Jürgen Habermas's obituary for Richard Rorty, signandsight.com, June 12, 2007.
• Dan Adleman's obituary for Richard Rorty, June 2007.
• Danny Postel's obituary for Richard Rorty in New Humanist, July/August 2007.
• Rorty eulogized by Richard Posner, Brian Eno, Mark Edmundson, Jürgen Habermas, Daniel Dennett, Stanley Fish, David Bromwich, Simon Blackburn, Morris Dickstein & others, Slate Magazine, June 18, 2007.
• "The Inspiring Power of the Shy Thinker: Richard Rorty" by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, TELOS, June 13, 2007.
• Richard Rorty at Princeton: Personal Recollections by Raymond Geuss in Arion, Winter 2008
• Rereading Rorty by Albrecht Wellmer in Krisis (journal), 2008, 2

William James

Born	(1842-01-11)January 11, 1842 New York City, New York
Died	August 26, 1910(1910-08-26) (aged 68) Tamworth, New Hampshire
Era	19th/20th century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy and Psychology
School	Pragmatism
Main interests	Pragmatism, Psychology, Philosophy of Religion, Epistemology, Meaning
Notable ideas	The Will to Believe Doctrine, the pragmatic theory of truth, radical empiricism, James-Lange theory of emotion, psychologist's fallacy
Influenced by Peirce, Hume, African Spir, Blaise Pascal,[1] Mill, Bain, Swedenborg, Schiller, Lotze, Reid, Renouvier, Brown
Influenced Dewey, Alan Watts, Schiller, Bergson, Santayana, Putnam, Rorty, Churchman, Jackson, Bill W., B. Alan Wallace, Mordecai Kaplan, Wittgenstein, Raknes, Cohen, Durkheim, W. E. B. Du Bois

This article is about the American psychologist and philosopher. For other people named William James see William James (disambiguation)

William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher who was trained as a physician. He was the first educator to offer a psychology course in the U.S.^[2] He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and on the philosophy of pragmatism. He was the brother of novelist Henry James and of diarist Alice James. In the summer of 1878, James married Alice Gibbens.

William James was born at the Astor House in New York City. He was the son of Henry James Sr., a noted and independently wealthy Swedenborgian theologian well acquainted with the literary and intellectual elites of his day. The intellectual brilliance of the James family milieu and the remarkable epistolary talents of several of its members have made them a subject of continuing interest to historians, biographers, and critics.

James interacted with a wide array of writers and scholars throughout his life, including his godfather Ralph Waldo Emerson, his godson William James Sidis, as well as Charles Sanders Peirce, Bertrand Russell, Josiah Royce, Ernst Mach, John Dewey, Macedonio Fernández, Walter Lippmann, Mark Twain, Horatio Alger, Jr., Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud.

Early life[link]

William James received an eclectic trans-Atlantic education, developing fluency in both German and French. Education in the James household encouraged cosmopolitanism. The family made two trips to Europe while William James was still a child, setting a pattern that resulted in thirteen more European journeys during his life. His early artistic bent led to an apprenticeship in the studio of William Morris Hunt in Newport, Rhode Island, but he switched in 1861 to scientific studies at the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard University.

In his early adulthood, James suffered from a variety of physical ailments, including those of the eyes, back, stomach, and skin. He was also tone deaf.^[3] He was subject to a variety of psychological symptoms which were diagnosed at the time as neurasthenia, and which included periods of depression during which he contemplated suicide for months on end. Two younger brothers, Garth Wilkinson (Wilky) and Robertson (Bob), fought in the Civil War. The other three siblings (William, Henry, and Alice James) all suffered from periods of invalidism.

James took up medical studies at Harvard Medical School in 1864. He took a break in the spring of 1865 to join naturalist Louis Agassiz on a scientific expedition up the Amazon River, but aborted his trip after eight months, as he suffered bouts of severe seasickness and mild smallpox. His studies were interrupted once again due to illness in April 1867. He traveled to Germany in search of a cure and remained until November 1868. (During this period he began to publish, with reviews appearing in literary periodicals like the North American Review.) He finally earned his M.D. degree in June 1869, but never practiced medicine. What he called his "soul-sickness" would only be resolved in 1872, after an extended period of philosophical searching. He married Alice Gibbens in 1878.

James's time in Germany proved intellectually fertile, helping him find that his true interests lay not in medicine but in philosophy and psychology. Later, in 1902 he would write: "I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality. I never had any philosophic instruction, the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave".^[4]

Career[link]

James spent almost his entire academic career at Harvard. He was appointed instructor in physiology for the spring 1873 term, instructor in anatomy and physiology in 1873, assistant professor of psychology in 1876, assistant professor of philosophy in 1881, full professor in 1885, endowed chair in psychology in 1889, return to philosophy in 1897, and emeritus professor of philosophy in 1907.

James studied medicine, physiology, and biology, and began to teach in those subjects, but was drawn to the scientific study of the human mind at a time when psychology was constituting itself as a science. James's acquaintance with the work of figures like Hermann Helmholtz in Germany and Pierre Janet in France facilitated his introduction of courses in scientific psychology at Harvard University. He taught his first experimental psychology course at Harvard in the 1875–1876 academic year.^[5]

During his Harvard years, James joined in philosophical discussions with Charles Peirce, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Chauncey Wright that evolved into a lively group informally known as The Metaphysical Club in 1872. Louis Menand speculates that the Club provided a foundation for American intellectual thought for decades to come.

William James and Josiah Royce, ca. 1910

Among James's students at Harvard University were such luminaries as Boris Sidis, Theodore Roosevelt, George Santayana, W. E. B. Du Bois, G. Stanley Hall, Ralph Barton Perry, Gertrude Stein, Horace Kallen, Morris Raphael Cohen, Walter Lippmann, Alain Locke, C. I. Lewis, and Mary Whiton Calkins.

Following his January, 1907 retirement from Harvard, James continued to write and lecture, publishing Pragmatism, A Pluralistic Universe, and The Meaning of Truth. James was increasingly afflicted with cardiac pain during his last years. It worsened in 1909 while he worked on a philosophy text (unfinished but posthumously published as Some Problems in Philosophy). He sailed to Europe in the spring of 1910 to take experimental treatments which proved unsuccessful, and returned home on August 18. His heart failed him on August 26, 1910 at his home in Chocorua, New Hampshire. He was buried in the family plot in Cambridge Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

He was one of the strongest proponents of the school of functionalism in psychology and of pragmatism in philosophy. He was a founder of the American Society for Psychical Research, as well as a champion of alternative approaches to healing. He challenged his professional colleagues not to let a narrow mindset prevent an honest appraisal of those beliefs.

In an empirical study by Haggbloom et al. using six criteria such as citations and recognition, James was found to be the 14th most eminent psychologist of the 20th Century.^[6]

Writings[link]

William James wrote voluminously throughout his life. A non-exhaustive bibliography of his writings, compiled by John McDermott, is 47 pages long.^[7] (See below for a list of his major writings and additional collections)

He gained widespread recognition with his monumental Principles of Psychology (1890), totaling twelve hundred pages in two volumes, which took twelve years to complete. Psychology: The Briefer Course, was an 1892 abridgement designed as a less rigorous introduction to the field. These works criticized both the English associationist school and the Hegelianism of his day as competing dogmatisms of little explanatory value, and sought to re-conceive the human mind as inherently purposive and selective.

President Jimmy Carter's Moral Equivalent of War Speech, on April 17, 1977, equating the United States' 1970's energy crisis, oil crisis and the changes and sacrifices Carter's proposed plans would require with the "moral equivalent of war," may have borrowed its title, much of its theme and the memorable phrase from James' classic essay "The Moral Equivalent of War" derived from his last speech, delivered at Stanford University in 1906, in which "James considered one of the classic problems of politics: how to sustain political unity and civic virtue in the absence of war or a credible threat...." and "...sounds a rallying cry for service in the interests of the individual and the nation." ^{[8] [9] [10]}

Epistemology[link]

James defined true beliefs as those that prove useful to the believer. His pragmatic theory of truth was a synthesis of correspondence theory of truth and coherence theory of truth, with an added dimension. Truth is verifiable to the extent that thoughts and statements correspond with actual things, as well as the extent to which they "hang together," or cohere, as pieces of a puzzle might fit together; these are in turn verified by the observed results of the application of an idea to actual practice.^[11][12]

"The most ancient parts of truth . . . also once were plastic. They also were called true for human reasons. They also mediated between still earlier truths and what in those days were novel observations. Purely objective truth, truth in whose establishment the function of giving human satisfaction in marrying previous parts of experience with newer parts played no role whatsoever, is nowhere to be found. The reasons why we call things true is the reason why they are true, for 'to be true' means only to perform this marriage-function," he wrote.^[13]

James held a world view in line with pragmatism, declaring that the value of any truth was utterly dependent upon its use to the person who held it. Additional tenets of James's pragmatism include the view that the world is a mosaic of diverse experiences that can only be properly interpreted and understood through an application of "radical empiricism." Radical empiricism, not related to the everyday scientific empiricism, asserts that the world and experience can never be halted for an entirely objective analysis, if nothing else the mind of the observer and simple act of observation will affect the outcome of any empirical approach to truth as the mind and its experiences, and nature are inseparable. James's emphasis on diversity as the default human condition — over and against duality, especially Hegelian dialectical duality — has maintained a strong influence in American culture, especially among liberals (see Richard Rorty). James's description of the mind-world connection, which he described in terms of a "stream of consciousness (psychology)", had a direct and significant impact on avant-garde and modernist literature and art.

In What Pragmatism Means, James writes that the central point of his own doctrine of truth is, in brief, that "Truths emerge from facts, but they dip forward into facts again and add to them; which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word is indifferent) and so on indefinitely. The 'facts' themselves meanwhile are not true. They simply are. Truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them." Richard Rorty claims that James did not mean to give a theory of truth with this statement and that we should not regard it as such. However, other pragmatism scholars such as Susan Haack and Howard Mounce do not share Rorty's instrumentalist interpretation of James.^[14]

In The Meaning of Truth, James seems to speak of truth in relativistic terms: "The critic's [sc., the critic of pragmatism] trouble...seems to come from his taking the word 'true' irrelatively, whereas the pragmatist always means 'true for him who experiences the workings.' "^[15] However, James responded to critics accusing him of relativism, scepticism or agnosticism, and of believing only in relative truths. To the contrary, he supported an epistemological realism position.^[16]

Cash Value[link]

From the introduction to William James's Pragmatism by Bruce Kuklick, p.xiv.

James went on to apply the pragmatic method to the epistemological problem of truth. He would seek the meaning of 'true' by examining how the idea functioned in our lives. A belief was true, he said, if it worked for all of us, and guided us expeditiously through our semihospitable world. James was anxious to uncover what true beliefs amounted to in human life, what their "Cash Value" was, what consequences they led to. A belief was not a mental entity which somehow mysteriously corresponded to an external reality if the belief were true. Beliefs were ways of acting with reference to a precarious environment, and to say they were true was to say they guided us satisfactorily in this environment. In this sense the pragmatic theory of truth applied Darwinian ideas in philosophy; it made survival the test of intellectual as well as biological fitness. If what was true was what worked, we can scientifically investigate religion's claim to truth in the same manner. The enduring quality of religious beliefs throughout recorded history and in all cultures gave indirect support for the view that such beliefs worked. James also argued directly that such beliefs were satisfying — they enabled us to lead fuller, richer lives and were more viable than their alternatives. Religious beliefs were expedient in human existence, just as scientific beliefs were.

Will to Believe Doctrine[link]

In William James's lecture of 1896 titled "The Will to Believe," James defends the right to violate the principle of evidentialism in order to justify hypothesis venturing. This idea foresaw the demise of evidentialism in the 20th century^{[citation needed]} and sought to ground justified belief in an unwavering principle that would prove more beneficial. Through his philosophy of pragmatism William James justifies religious beliefs by using the results of his hypothetical venturing as evidence to support the hypothesis' truth. Therefore, this doctrine allows one to assume belief in God and prove His existence by what the belief brings to one's life.

Free will[link]

In The Will to Believe, James simply asserted that his will was free. As his first act of freedom, he said, he chose to believe his will was free. He was encouraged to do this by reading Charles Renouvier, whose work convinced James to convert from monism to pluralism. In his diary entry of April 30, 1870, James wrote,

"I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier's second Essais and see no reason why his definition of free will — 'the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts' — need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present — until next year — that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will."^[17]

In 1884 James set the terms for all future discussions of determinism and compatibilism in the free will debates with his lecture to Harvard Divinity School students published as "The Dilemma of Determinism." In this talk he defined the common terms "hard determinism' and "soft determinism" (now more commonly called "compatibilism").

"Old-fashioned determinism was what we may call hard determinism. It did not shrink from such words as fatality, bondage of the will, necessitation, and the like. Nowadays, we have a soft determinism which abhors harsh words, and, repudiating fatality, necessity, and even predetermination, says that its real name is freedom; for freedom is only necessity understood, and bondage to the highest is identical with true freedom."^[18]

James called compatibilism a "quagmire of evasion,"^[18] just as the ideas of Thomas Hobbes and David Hume that free will was simply freedom from external coercion were called a "wretched subterfuge" by Immanuel Kant.

James described chance as neither hard nor soft determinism, but "indeterminism". He said

"The stronghold of the determinist argument is the antipathy to the idea of chance...This notion of alternative possibility, this admission that any one of several things may come to pass is, after all, only a roundabout name for chance." ^[19]

James asked the students to consider his choice for walking home from Lowell Lecture Hall after his walk.

"What is meant by saying that my choice of which way to walk home after the lecture is ambiguous and matter of chance?...It means that both Divinity Avenue and Oxford Street are called but only one, and that one either one, shall be chosen."^[20]

With this simple example, James was the first thinker to enunciate clearly a two-stage decision process (others include Henri Poincaré, Arthur Holly Compton, Karl Popper), with chance in a present time of random alternatives, leading to a choice which grants consent to one possibility and transforms an equivocal ambiguous future into an unalterable and simple past. There is a temporal sequence of undetermined alternative possibilities followed by adequately determined choices.

James’ two-stage model effectively separates chance (the indeterministic free element) from choice (an arguably determinate decision that follows causally from one’s character, values, and especially feelings and desires at the moment of decision).

Philosophy of religion[link]

James did important work in philosophy of religion. In his Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh he provided a wide-ranging account of The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) and interpreted them according to his pragmatic leanings. Some of the important claims he makes in this regard:

• Religious genius (experience) should be the primary topic in the study of religion, rather than religious institutions—since institutions are merely the social descendant of genius.
• The intense, even pathological varieties of experience (religious or otherwise) should be sought by psychologists, because they represent the closest thing to a microscope of the mind—that is, they show us in drastically enlarged form the normal processes of things.
• In order to usefully interpret the realm of common, shared experience and history, we must each make certain "over-beliefs" in things which, while they cannot be proven on the basis of experience, help us to live fuller and better lives.

The investigation of mystical experience was constant throughout the life of James, leading him to experiment with chloral hydrate (1870), amyl nitrite (1875), nitrous oxide (1882), and even peyote (1896). James claimed that it was only when he was under the influence of nitrous oxide that he was able to understand Hegel.^[21] He concluded that while the revelations of the mystic hold true, they hold true only for the mystic; for others, they are certainly ideas to be considered, but can hold no claim to truth without personal experience of such. For example, consider the claim to truth held by the immutable laws of physics.

Instincts[link]

Like Sigmund Freud, James was influenced by Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection.^[22] At the core of James' theory of psychology, as defined in Principles of Psychology (1890), was a system of "instincts."^[22] James wrote that humans had many instincts, even more than other animals.^[22] These instincts, he said, could be overridden by experience and by each other, as many of the instincts were actually in conflict with each other.^[22] In the 1920s, however, psychology turned away from evolutionary theory and embraced radical behaviorism.^[22]