Rorty, Richard M(cKay) 1931-

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RORTY, Richard M(cKay) 1931-

PERSONAL: Born October 4, 1931, in New York, NY; son of James (a writer) and Winifred (a writer; maiden name, Raushenbush) Rorty; married Amelie Oksenberg (a college teacher), June 15, 1954 (divorced, September 1, 1972); married Mary Rosalind Varney (a college professor), November 4, 1972; children: (first marriage) Jay; (second marriage) Patricia, Kevin. Education: University of Chicago, B.A., 1949, M.A., 1952; Yale University, Ph.D., 1956. Politics: Democrat. Religion: None.

ADDRESSES: Offıce—Department of Comparative Literature, Stanford University, Pigott Hall, Bldg. 260 Stanford, CA 94305-2031 E-mail—rrorty@stanford. edu.

CAREER: Yale University, New Haven, CT, instructor in philosophy, 1955-56; Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA, instructor, 1958-60, assistant professor of philosophy, 1960-61; Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, assistant professor, 1961-65, associate professor, 1965-70, professor of philosophy, 1970-82; University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Kenan Professor of Humanities, 1982-98, professor emeritus, 1998; Stanford University, Stanford, CA, professor of comparative literature, 1998—. Military service: U.S. Army, 1957-58.

MEMBER: American Philosophical Association (former president).

AWARDS, HONORS: American Council of Learned Societies fellow, 1969-70; Guggenheim fellow, 1973-74; MacArthur Prize fellow, 1981-86.

WRITINGS:

(Editor and author of introduction) The LinguisticTurn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1967, revised edition published as The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method, 1992.

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1979, revised edition, 1980.

The Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972-1980, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1982.

(Editor with J. B. Schneewind and Quentin Skinner) Philosophy in History: Essays on the Historiography of Philosophy, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1984.

The Contingency of Selfhood: The Seventh TykocinerMemorial Lecture, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Foellinger Auditorium, April 3, 1986, 8:00 p.m., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Urbana, IL), 1986.

The Barber of Kasbeam: Nabokov on Cruelty, Bennington College (Bennington, VT), 1989.

Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1989.

Anti-Essentialism in General: The Number Seventeen as a Model for Reality, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto (Toronto, Canada), 1990.

Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1991.

Essays on Heidegger and Others, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1991.

(With Anindita Niyogi Balslev) Cultural Otherness:Correspondence with Richard Rorty, Munshiram Manohar Lal (New Delhi, India), 1991, Scholars Press (Atlanta, GA), 1999.

(Editor with Robert P. Scharlemann, Roy Wagner, and Michael Brint) On the Other: Dialogue and/or Dialectics: Mark Taylor's "Paralectics," University Press of America (Lanham, MD), 1991.

Hoffnung statt Erkenntnis: Eine Einführung in die pragmatische Philosophie, Passagen Verlag (Vienna, Austria), 1994, translation published as Hope in Place of Knowledge: The Pragmatics Tradition in Philosophy, Institute of European and American Studies, Academic Sinica (Taipei, Taiwan), 1999.

Truth, Politics and "Post-Modernism": Spinoza Lectures, Van Gorcum (Assen), 1997.

Truth and Progress, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1998.

Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, Harvard University Press, 1998.

Philosophy and Social Hope, Penguin (New York, NY), 2000.

Contributor to anthologies and philosophical journals.

SIDELIGHTS: According to Jerry A. Varsava in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, "Richard Rorty is the most widely read, most broadly influential U.S. philosopher of the last quarter of the twentieth century. Beginning with his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty has made several major contributions in the areas of epistemology, ontology, ethics, and language. Yet, his reputation extends far beyond the disciplinary boundaries of academic philosophy since his philosophical writings, beginning in the early 1980s, have been supplemented by discussions of significant political topics of the day such as the nature of citizenship, gender politics, American democracy, and postmodern liberalism, among many others. A catholicity of interests, a quite extraordinary productivity as an essayist, and the relative accessibility of his plain-English approach to philosophy and cultural critique have ensured for Rorty a considerable readership both within the United States and, through extensive translation of his major works, throughout the world. Any serious student of American postmodern culture must contend with the voluminous writings of Rorty on the subject."

Reviewing Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature in the New York Review of Books, Quentin Skinner described the title as a "disturbing and brilliantly argued book." In this volume Rorty argues that philosophy has a pretentious view of its own importance and that "the search for the indubitable foundations of our thought is no more likely to succeed than the search for the unicorn, and ought immediately (and for the same reason) to be called off," Skinner explained. Varsava emphasized Rorty's argument that "literature and literary criticism have supplanted the 'cultural function' formerly held by philosophy to serve as 'a source for youth's self-description of its own difference from the past.'" "This is a book of exceptional originality and importance," Skinner concluded, "and its central argument is presented with immense persuasive force." Varsava concluded that "given its relative rhetorical lightness, its willingness to draw illustrations from myriad areas, and its deft capacity to condense and summarize complex positions, this lengthy study continues to be informative and appealingly readable long after its first publication."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Arcilla, René Vincent, For the Love of Perfection: Richard Rorty and Liberal Education, Routledge (New York, NY), 1995.

Brandom, Robert B., editor, Rorty and His Critics, Blackwell (Malden, MA), 2000.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 246: Twentieth-Century American Cultural Theorists, Gale (Detroit, MI), 2001.

Festenstein, Matthew, Pragmatism and PoliticalTheory: From Dewey to Rorty, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1998.

Festenstein, Matthew, and Simon Thompson, editors, Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues, Polity Press (Malden, MA), 2001.

Gander, Eric M., The Last Conceptual Revolution: A Critique of Richard Rorty's Political Philosophy, State University of New York Press (Albany, NY), 1998.

Geras, Norman, Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind: The Ungroundable Liberalism of Richard Rorty, Verso (New York, NY), 1996. Gutting, Gary, Pragmatic Liberalism and the Critique of Modernity, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1999.

Haber, Honi Fern, Beyond Postmodern Politics: Lyotard, Rorty, Foucault, Routledge (New York, NY), 1994.

Hall, David L., Richard Rorty: Prophet and Poet of the New Pragmatism, State University of New York Press (Albany, NY), 1998.

Hardwick, Charles and Donald A. Crosby, editors, Pragmatism, Neo-Pragmatism, and Religion: Conversations with Richard Rorty, Peter Lang (New York, NY), 1997.

Horster, Detlef, Richard Rorty zur Einführung, Junius (Hamburg, Germany), 1991.

House, D. Vaden, Without God or His Doubles: Realism, Relativism, and Rorty, E. J. Brill (New York, NY), 1994.

Kilian, Monika, Modern and Postmodern Strategies: Gaming and the Question of Morality: Adorno, Rorty, Lyotard, and Enzensberger, Peter Lang (New York, NY), 1998.

Kolenda, Konstantin, Rorty's Humanistic Pragmatism: Philosophy Democratized, University of South Florida Press (Tampa, FL), 1990.

Kuipers, Ronald Alexander, Solidarity and the Stranger: Themes in the Social Philosophy of Richard Rorty, University Press of America (Lanham, MD), 1997.

Langsdorf, Lenore, and Andrew R. Smith, editors, Recovering Pragmatism's Voice: The Classical Tradition, Rorty, and the Philosophy of Communication, State University of New York Press (Albany, NY), 1995.

Letson, Ben H., Davidson's Theory of Truth and its Implications for Rorty's Pragmatism, Peter Lang (New York, NY), 1997.

Malachowski, Alan R., editor, Reading Rorty: Critical Responses to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (And Beyond), Blackwell (Cambridge, MA), 1990.

Melkonian, Markar, Richard Rorty's Politics: Liberalism at the End of the American Century, Humanity Books (Amherst, NY), 1999.

Mounce, H. O., The Two Pragmatisms: From Peirce to Rorty, Routledge (New York, NY), 1997.

Nielson, Kai, After the Demise of Tradition: Rorty, Critical Theory, and the Fate of Philosophy, Westview Press (Boulder, CO), 1991.

Niznik, Józef and John T. Sanders, editors, Debating the State of Philosophy: Habermas, Rorty, and Kolakowski, Praeger (Westport, CT), 1996.

Pettegrew, John, editor, A Pragmatist's Progress?: Richard Rorty and American Intellectual History, Rowman & Littlefield (Lanham, MD), 2000.

Puckett, Kent and Derek Nystrom, Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies: A Conversation with Richard Rorty, Prickly Pear Pamphlets (Charlottesville, VA), 1998.

Reese-Schäfer, Walter, Richard Rorty, Campus (New York, NY), 1991.

Rothleder, Dianne, The Work of Friendship: Rorty, His Critics, and the Project of Solidarity, State University of New York Press (Albany, NY), 1999.

Saatkaap, Herman J., Jr., editor, Rorty and Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to His Critics, Vanderbilt University Press (Nashville, TN), 1995.

Tolland, Anders, Epistemological Relativism and Relativistic Epistemology: Richard Rorty and the Possibility of a Philosophical Theory of Knowledge, Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis (Göteborg, Sweden), 1991.

PERIODICALS

American Scholar, Volume 65, No. 3, 1996, Tibor Machan, "Indefatigable Alchemist: Richard Rorty's Radical Pragmatism," pp. 417-424.

Commonweal, January 26, 1968, Gordon D. Kaufman, review of The Linguistic Turn, pp. 511 513; May 6, 1994, Richard Marino, "Shattering Philosophy's Mirror: A Conversation with Richard Rorty," pp. 11-14.

Dualist: A National Journal of Undergraduate Work in Philosophy, spring, 1995, Joshua Knobe, "A Talent for Bricolage: An Interview with Richard Rorty," pp. 56-71.

Harvard Review of Philosophy, spring, 1995, Michael O'Shea, "Richard Rorty: Toward a Post-Metaphysical Culture," pp. 58-66.

History: Review of New Books, fall, 2000, Richard Striner, review of A Pragmatist's Progress?: Richard Rorty and American Intellectual History, p. 4.

Journal of Advanced Composition, Number 9, 1989, Gary A. Olson, "Social Construction and Composition Theory: A Conversation with Richard Rorty," pp. 1-9.

KRISIS: Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, September, 1988, Irene Klaver, Pieter Pekelharing, and Jan Flameling, "Interview with Richard Rorty," pp. 68-83. Los Angeles Times Book Review, December 19, 1982.

Michigan Quarterly Review, Volume 30, No. 2, 1991, Nancy Fraser, "From Irony to Prophecy to Politics," pp. 259-266.

New York Review of Books, March 19, 1981, Quentin Skinner, "The End of Philosophy?," pp. 46 48.

Partisan Review, Volume 63, no. 2, 1996, Eugene Goodheart, "The Postmodern Liberalism of Richard Rorty," pp. 223-235; Volume 67, no. 2, 1999, Diggins, John Patrick, "Pragmatism: A Philosophy for Adults Only," pp. 255-262.

Times Higher Education Supplement (London, England), June 6, 1997, Sean Sayers, "Is the Truth Out There?" p. 18.

Times Literary Supplement, June 24, 1994, Martyn Oliver, "Towards a Liberal Utopia: An Interview with Richard Rorty," p. 14.*