Richard Rorty

Richard McKay Rorty (1931–2007) was an American philosopher. Trained in the tradition of analytic philosophy, he later developed an influential form of pragmatism. After earning his PhD from Yale University in 1956, he taught at Wellesley College and was a professor of analytic philosophy at Princeton University from 1961 to 1982. He subsequently served as Kenan Professor of the Humanities at the University of Virginia and, from 1998, taught comparative literature at Stanford University. His best-known work, “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” (1979), offered a sustained critique of a number of traditional philosophical assumptions.