Blackwell Reference Online

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Richard Rorty has taught at Wellesley, Princeton, and the University of Virginia. Since retiring from Virginia, he has been a member of the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford. Early in his career, Rorty wrote extensively on topics in the philosophy of mind, emerging as an influential defender of eliminative materialism. But he was also concerned with metaphilosophical questions. His introduction to his anthology, The Linguistic Turn , surveys the history of the analytic movement with the aim of casting doubt on the view that, by centering philosophy on questions of language and meaning, analytic philosophy provides philosophers with new and more “scientific” methods for solving traditional philosophical problems. This argument foreshadows the radical turn taken by his mature work. The main themes of this work emerge in a series of essays published in the 1970s and collected in Consequences of Pragmatism (1982) . However, it was his book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) , that made him the object of intense and often outraged critical scrutiny. In this book, he argues that philosophy, as practiced in mainstream Anglo-American philosophy departments, has exhausted its theoretical resources and outlived whatever usefulness it may once have had. It therefore deserves to come to an end. Like other “therapeutic” philosophers, Rorty holds that our canonical ... log in or subscribe to read full text