Richard Rorty, the eminent public intellectual and Stanford University professor who resuscitated American pragmatism with groundbreaking work that urged philosophers to give up the illusory pursuit of ultimate truths and concentrate on being relevant, has died. He was 75.
Rorty died of pancreatic cancer Friday at his home on the Stanford campus, according to the university, where he had taught in the comparative literature department for seven years before retiring in 2006.
Called "an anti-philosopher's philosopher," Rorty was a major American thinker whose most influential contribution was "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature," a 1979 book that marked his shift from the analytic tradition of G.E. Moore, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein to the pragmatist camp of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey.
With this foundational change in his thinking, Rorty became a target of prickly debate in philosophy circles and attracted critics across the political spectrum.
"He did try to rewrite the history of philosophy a little bit. What he accomplished," said Richard Watson, a longtime friend and emeritus professor of philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis, "was getting himself as a philosopher taken very seriously by people in many other fields.... He changed the image of a philosopher in the United States."
Rorty's desire to be relevant led him to concentrate intensely on questions of culture and politics. "Dick appealed to a deeper tradition in Western philosophy" that turned philosophy into an "inquiry into the good life, how we can best live in political communities with respect for each other," said Russell Berman, chairman of Stanford's comparative literature department.
An unabashed liberal, Rorty articulated his view of the good life in a prolific output of essays and articles for journals such as the Nation and Dissent. In his writings about closing the wage gap, reducing poverty and fighting social injustice, Rorty was critical of America yet insisted that he regarded the country "pretty much as Whitman and Dewey did, as opening a prospect on illimitable democratic vistas." His promotion of national pride was at the center of one of his last books, "Achieving Our Country" (1998).
"I think that our country -- despite its past and present atrocities and vices, and despite its continuing eagerness to elect fools and knaves to high office -- is a good example of the best kind of society so far invented," Rorty wrote in his book "Philosophy and Social Hope" (2000).
