Richard Rorty
Richard Rorty
Richard McKay Rortywas an American philosopher. Educated at the University of Chicago and Yale University, he had strong interests and training in both the history of philosophy and contemporary analytic philosophy, the latter of which came to comprise the main focus of his work at Princeton University in the 1960s. He subsequently came to reject the tradition of philosophy according to which knowledge involves correct representationof a world whose existence remains wholly independent of that representation. Rorty had a long...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth4 October 1931
CountryUnited States of America
Richard Rorty quotes about
[Walt] Whitman and [humanist educator John] Dewey tried to substitute hope for knowledge. They wanted to put shared utopian dreams - dreams of an ideally decent and civilized society - in the place of knowledge of God's Will, Moral Law, the Laws of History, or the Facts of Science.... As long as we have a functioning political left, we still have a chance to achieve our country, to make it the country of Whitman's and Dewey's dreams.
My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.
Philosophers get attention only when they appear to be doing something sinister--corrupting the youth, undermining the foundations of civilization, sneering at all we hold dear. The rest of the time everybody assumes that they are hard at work somewhere down in the sub-basement, keeping those foundations in good repair. Nobody much cares what brand of intellectual duct tape is being used.
Freedom is the recognition of contingency.
I illustrate with a quotation from the atheist philosopher Richard Rorty, who died recently and is, I suspect, now having a lengthy conversation with his maker. Rorty argued that secular professors ought “to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own.
If the body had been easier to understand, nobody would have thought that we had a mind.
Had there been no Plato, the Christians would have had a harder time selling the idea that all God really wanted from us was fraternal love.
Academic disciplines are subject to being overtaken by attacks of "knowingness"- a state of mind and soul that prevents shudders of awe and makes one immune to enthusiasm.
Every government, left or right, always engages in moral crusades. What else are they supposed to do? Especially when they make war; any war has to be a moral crusade.
We are equal inhabitants of a paradise of individuals in which everybody has the right to be understood.
The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that.
National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement.
Truth [is] what is better for us to believe.
Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative.