Rorty postmodern bourgeois liberalism pdf file

Rorty enrolled at the University of Chicago shortly before turning 15, where he received a bachelor's and a master's degree in philosophy (studying under Richard McKeon), continuing at Yale University for a PhD in philosophy (1952вЂ“1956). Asked at the end of his life about the 'holy', the strict atheist answered with words reminiscent of the young Hegel: '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.'

His colleague JГјrgen Habermas's obituary for Rorty points out that Rorty's contrasting childhood experiences, such as beautiful orchids versus reading a book in his parents' house that defended Leon Trotsky against Stalin, created an early interest in philosophy. Rorty wrote about the beauty of rural New Jersey orchids in his short autobiography, 'Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,' and his desire to combine aesthetic beauty and social justice. The second breakdown, which he had in the early 1960s, was more serious and 'included claims to divine prescience.' Consequently, Richard Rorty fell into depression as a teenager and in 1962 began a six-year psychiatric analysis for obsessional neurosis. His father experienced two nervous breakdowns in his later life. His maternal grandfather, Walter Rauschenbusch, was a central figure in the Social Gospel movement of the early 20th century. His parents, James and Winifred Rorty, were activists, writers and social democrats. Richard Rorty was born on October 4, 1931, in New York City.

2.1 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.

He also emphasized the reasons why the interpretation of culture as conversation ( Bernstein 1971) constitutes the crucial concept of a ' postphilosophical' culture determined to abandon representationalist accounts of traditional epistemology, incorporating American pragmatism with metaphysical naturalism. Rorty tied this brand of philosophy to the notion of 'social hope' he believed that without the representationalist accounts, and without metaphors between the mind and the world, human society would behave more peacefully. Rorty believed abandoning representationalist accounts of knowledge and language would lead to a state of mind he referred to as ' ironism', in which people become completely aware of the contingency of their placement in history and of their philosophical vocabulary. Against this approach, Rorty advocated for a novel form of American pragmatism (sometimes called neopragmatism) in which scientific and philosophical methods form merely a set of contingent ' vocabularies' which people abandon or adopt over time according to social conventions and usefulness. Rorty saw the idea of knowledge as a 'mirror of nature' as pervasive throughout the history of western philosophy. Among his most influential books are Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989). Rorty had a long and diverse academic career, including positions as Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia, and Professor of Comparative literature at Stanford University. He subsequently came to reject the tradition of philosophy according to which knowledge involves correct representation (a 'mirror of nature') of a world whose existence remains wholly independent of that representation. Richard McKay Rorty (OctoвЂ“ June 8, 2007) was an American philosopher.Д®ducated 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 constitute the main focus of his work at Princeton University in the 1960s.

Rorty postmodern bourgeois liberalism pdf file