Richard Rorty, 1931-2007

Richard Rorty, the leading American philosopher and heir to the pragmatist tradition, passed away on Friday, June 8.

He was Professor of Comparative Literature emeritus at Stanford University. In April the American Philosophical Society awarded him the Thomas Jefferson Medal. The prize citation reads: "In recognition of his influential and distinctively American contribution to philosophy and, more widely, to humanistic studies. His work redefined knowledge 'as a matter of conversation and of social practice, rather than as an attempt to mirror nature' and thus redefined philosophy itself as an unending, democratically disciplined, social and cultural activity of inquiry, reflection, and exchange, rather than an activity governed and validated by the concept of objective, extramental truth."

At the awards ceremony, presenter Lionel Gossman celebrated Dr. Rorty as an advocate of "a deeply liberal, democratic, and truly American way of thinking about knowledge." Dr. Rorty's published works include Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1988), Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers I (1991), Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers II (1991), Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America (1998), Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers III (1998), and Philosophy and Social Hope (2000).

via Telos

Touched by Bloodless Abstraction

The argument about indifference here needs elaborating. The ‘indifference’ – and in one case the advertising of one’s indifference – amounts to saying ‘what does not touch my immediate experience is a matter of little concern to me, or concerns me only as it touches my immediate experience, community, interests.’ Another, slightly more philosophical way of putting it is that I am touched by what happens to those who share the same predicates as me – white, middle-class, American or whatever. Conversely, I am incapable of being touched by - or really grasping - a level of humanity that precedes such predicates. My moral compass is governed by the accident of nearness. Thus, such people are spontaneous Rorty-ite liberals, a position here deftly summarised and defeated by Teagleton:

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