Richard Rorty

Richard Rorty, whose books included Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Truth and Progress, was professor emeritus of comparative literature and philosophy at Stanford University. He died in 2007.

Letter

Whose turn?

7 October 1993

Toward the beginning of Jerry Fodor’s penetrating review of Christopher Peacocke’s new book (LRB, 7 October), he attributes to me the term ‘the linguistic turn’. I used that term as the title of an anthology I published in 1967, but it was coined by the late Gustav Bergmann – an original and important, though now unfortunately neglected, philosopher. Fodor’s mistake is often made, and is...
Letter

Making truth

24 July 1986

Richard Rorty writes: Robert McShea and I disagree about whether the questions ‘By what standard?’ or ‘Upon what foundation?’ always have a useful answer, and so we differ on the value of a philosophical view which offers no answer to such questions. I regret that McShea did not explicitly discuss my attempt, in ‘The Contingency of Community’ (LRB, 24 July), to explain how my view can be...
Letter

Making truth

8 May 1986

Richard Rorty writes: Robert McShea and I disagree about whether the questions ‘By what standard?’ or ‘Upon what foundation?’ always have a useful answer, and so we differ on the value of a philosophical view which offers no answer to such questions. I regret that McShea did not explicitly discuss my attempt, in ‘The Contingency of Community’ (LRB, 24 July), to explain how my view can be...
Letter

Making truth

17 April 1986

Richard Rorty writes: Robert McShea and I disagree about whether the questions ‘By what standard?’ or ‘Upon what foundation?’ always have a useful answer, and so we differ on the value of a philosophical view which offers no answer to such questions. I regret that McShea did not explicitly discuss my attempt, in ‘The Contingency of Community’ (LRB, 24 July), to explain how my view can be...

Strenuous Unbelief: Richard Rorty

Jonathan Rée, 15 October 1998

Back in the Sixties, before he became the bad boy of American philosophy, Richard Rorty struck his colleagues as a safe and promising young man. His first book, published in 1967, was an...

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Getting it right

Bernard Williams, 23 November 1989

An energetic thinker with some original ideas may understandably rebel against the oppressive demand to get it right, especially when the demand comes, as it often does, from cautious and...

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Liberation Philosophy

Hilary Putnam, 20 March 1986

This volume is advertised as ‘confronting the current debate between philosophy and its history’. What it turns out to contain is a series of lectures with the general title...

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Conversations with Rorty

Paul Seabright, 16 June 1983

In the opening pages of Gibbon’s Autobiography, there is an entertaining account of a visit to Virginia in 1659 by his ancestor Matthew Gibbon:     In this remote...

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The concerns of academic philosophy are to some degree the concerns of everybody. At the same time, they often appear to plain pre-philosophical men and women – including those perhaps not...

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