Rorty, Richard

(1931– )

American philosopher and critic. Educated at Chicago and Yale, Rorty has been professor of humanities at the university of Virginia since 1982. He is widely known as an analytic philosopher who has turned against what he regards as the traditional categories of concern in that tradition—truth, knowledge, objectivity—and substituted a free-wheeling postmodernist version of pragmatism, linked with writers such as Heidegger and Gadamer, in which these topics are banished. Having risen above such concerns the liberal intellectual maintains an ironic and detached attitude even to his or her fundamental convictions; intellectual life becomes a kind of dilettante conversation, and critics find unsettling the political quietism or conservatism this suggests. Influential books include Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) and Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989).