Richard Rorty

Richard McKay Rorty
Full name	Richard McKay Rorty
Born	October 4, 1931(1931-10-04) New York City
Died	June 8, 2007 (aged 75)
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Postanalytic, Pragmatism
Main interests	Philosophy of language, Philosophy of mind, Ethics. Metaphilosophy, Liberalism, Meta-epistemology
Notable ideas	Postphilosophy, Ironism, Final vocabulary, Epistemological behaviorism
Influenced by Dewey · Heidegger · Wittgenstein · Sellars · Nietzsche · Quine · Davidson · James · Rawls · Proust · Nabokov · Gadamer
Influenced Brandom · McDowell · Williams · Vattimo · West · Fraser · Harris

Richard McKay Rorty (October 4, 1931 – June 8, 2007) was an American philosopher. He had a long and diverse career in Philosophy, Humanities, and Literature departments. His complex intellectual background gave him a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the analytic tradition in philosophy he would later, famously, reject.

Biography

Richard Rorty was born October 4, 1931, in New York City. ^[1] His parents, James and Winifred Rorty, were activists, writers and social democrats. And his maternal grandfather, Walter Rauschenbusch, was a central figure in the Social Gospel movement of the early 20th century.^[2] 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."^[3]

Rorty enrolled at the University of Chicago shortly before turning 15, where he received a bachelor's and a master's degree in philosophy, continuing at Yale University for a PhD in philosophy (1952-1956).^[4] He married another academic, Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (Harvard University professor), in 1954 and had his son, Jay. After two years in the army, he taught at Wellesley College for three years, until 1961.^[5] Rorty divorced and then remarried to Stanford University bioethicist, Mary Varney Rorty, in 1972. They had two children, Kevin and Patricia.

Rorty was a professor of philosophy at Princeton University for 21 years.^[5] In 1982 he became Kenan Professor of the Humanities at the University Of Virginia.^[6] In 1997 Rorty became professor emeritus of comparative literature (and philosophy, by courtesy), at Stanford University.^[6] During this period he was especially popular, and once quipped that he had been assigned to the position of "transitory professor of trendy studies".^[7]

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 a proposition is useful if employing it helps us understand or solve a given problem. 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.

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 John 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)^[8], 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. ^[4][6][9]

Major works

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

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

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, though in later works he never really returns to it.

Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth

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

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

In Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (1998), 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. 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.

Rorty and His Critics

On fundamentalist religion, Rorty said:

“It seems to me that the regulative idea that we heirs of the Enlightenment, we Socratists, most frequently use to criticize the conduct of various conversational partners is that of ‘needing education in order to outgrow their primitive fear, hatreds, and superstitions’ ... It is a concept which I, like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own ... The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire ‘American liberal establishment’ is engaged in a conspiracy. The parents have a point. Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten teachers talking with their students ... When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank... You have to be educated in order to be ... a participant in our conversation ... So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours ... I don’t see anything herrschaftsfrei [domination free] about my handling of my fundamentalist students. Rather, I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft [domination] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents ... I am just as provincial and contextualist as the Nazi teachers who made their students read Der Stürmer; the only difference is that I serve a better cause.”

– ‘Universality and Truth,’ in Robert B. Brandom (ed.), Rorty and his Critics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 21-2.

On human rights

His 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. We need to create a global human rights culture in order to stop violations from happening through 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

Rorty is one of the most widely discussed and most controversial of philosophers of recent years,^[10] 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.^[11]

John McDowell is strongly influenced by Rorty, particularly by Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979).^[12] In continental philosophy, authors such as Jürgen Habermas, Gianni Vattimo, Jacques Derrida, Albrecht Wellmer, Hans Joas, Chantal Mouffe, Simon Critchley, Alexander Bard, 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^[13]. Rorty was also criticized by others for his rejection of the idea that science can depict the world.^[14] One major criticism, especially of Contingency, irony, and solidarity is that Rorty's philosophical 'hero', the ironist, is an elitist figure ^[15]. 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 was someone who: 1) "has radical and continuing doubts about her final vocabulary"; 2) "realizes that argument phrased in her vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts"; and 3) "does not think her 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.^[16] 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.

As detailed in Contingency, irony, and solidarity, many philosophical criticisms against Rorty are made using axioms that are explicitly rejected within Rorty's own philosophy.^[17] For instance, Rorty defines allegations of irrationality as affirmations of vernacular "otherness", and so accusations of irrationality are not only brushed aside, but are expected during any argument.^[18]

Select bibliography

• Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. ISBN
• Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. ISBN
• Philosophy in History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. (co-editor)
• Contingency, irony, and solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ISBN
• 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

• American philosophy
• Analytic philosophy
• Contributions to liberal theory
• Liberalism
• List of thinkers influenced by deconstruction
• List of American philosophers
• Postanalytic philosophy
• Deconstruction-and-religion

Notes

Further reading

Books

• The domestication of Derrida: Rorty, pragmatism and deconstruction / Lorenzo Fabbri., 2008
• Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher / Neil Gross, 2008
• 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

• 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

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Richard Rorty

• 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.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry
• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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