June 20, 2007
Richard Rorty the American philosopher, died of cancer on Friday (8 June) in Stanford, CA.; trained as a philosopher, Rorty was an outspoken "public intellectual" and extremely influential in the resurgence of pragmatism in both intellectual and political discourse.
Rejecting the Platonist tradition at an early age, Rorty was initially attracted to analytic philosophy. As his views matured he came to believe that this tradition suffered in its own way from representationalism, the fatal flaw he associated with Platonism. Influenced by the writings of Darwin, Gadamer, Hegel and Heidegger, he turned towards pragmatism.
It was G. W. F. Hegel’s willingness in his Phenomenology of the Spirit (1977) to abandon certainty and eternity as philosophical and moral goals/ideals that inspired Rorty to appreciate the irreducible temporality of everything as well as to understand philosophy as a contingent narrative readable without a moral precept existing behind the storyline
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