Richard Rorty, 1931-2007

richard-rorty.jpgTelos reports the death of Richard Rorty last Friday. I got engaged with Rorty’s ideas when I was the philosophy editor at Amazon.com and reviewed books like Achieving Our Country; I still consider his pragmatism a strong influence on my way of thinking a decade later. Todd Gitlin remembers Rorty as a philosopher who “put his fingers squarely on the central thought dilemmas (or multilemmas) of our time” and “didn’t use philosophy as a dodge from politics—sensible liberal social-democratic politics at that.”

The photo above comes from a Stanford News article about a 2005 lecture where Rorty slammed mind/body dualism, asking, “Why did this bad idea enter our culture?”

10 June 2007 | obituaries |