Richard Rorty

Rorty was born in New York to left-wing intellectuals, Trotskyist writers and activists whose guests included Dewey's student Sidney Hook. He entered the University of Chicago at fifteen, took his master's at twenty, and in 1956 his doctorate at Yale on the concept of potentiality; at that time he was a believer in metaphysics. After two years in the army he taught at Wellesley and in 1961 went to Princeton, where his 1967 anthology The Linguistic Turn made him one of the representative figures of analytic philosophy.

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) shook the discipline. Modern philosophy from Descartes and Locke to Kant, it argued, had treated the mind as a mirror reflecting nature, with epistemology charged to check the mirror's accuracy; but Quine, Sellars, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Dewey had together destroyed that picture: there are no neutral representations, no foundations prior to all practice, and knowledge is a matter of social justification, not correspondence between mind and reality. Philosophy should stop arbitrating among the disciplines and become one voice in the human conversation, an 'edifying' rather than 'systematic' activity.

In 1982 he left philosophy departments for a chair in the humanities at the University of Virginia, and in 1998 for comparative literature at Stanford, calling himself a 'transitory professor'. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) set out his political philosophy: a liberal is someone who thinks cruelty the worst thing we do, an ironist someone aware that their final vocabulary is contingent, and the two can be combined: Nietzschean self-creation in private, solidarity against cruelty in public. Philosophy cannot ground democracy, and novels and journalism do more than theory to widen our sensitivity to others' pain.

For this analytic philosophers charged him with abandoning truth, continental philosophers with shallowness, the left with reformism, the right with relativism. He said he was merely 'thinking post-philosophically'. Achieving Our Country (1998) criticised the cultural politics of the American academic left, called for a return to the progressive reform tradition, and predicted that economic insecurity would push voters toward a 'strongman'. In his last years he wrote on religion, human rights and the future of pragmatism; he died of pancreatic cancer in 2007, and his final essay said that poetry had consoled him more than philosophy.