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Thinkers

Richard Rorty

American · North America · 1931 to 2007

American philosopher who urged us to give up the hope of a perfect mirror of reality. He pointed us toward solidarity and conversation.

What it is

Richard Rorty (1931 to 2007) was an American philosopher who argued that knowledge is not a mirror of nature, that philosophy should give up the search for foundations, and that a liberal and hopeful society is worth working for without them. He developed a distinctive and controversial brand of pragmatism, sometimes called neopragmatism, and he combined a training in philosophy with a wide interest in literature.

He began in the analytic tradition, which treats philosophy as a careful study of language and logic, and gradually turned against what he came to see as its hidden assumptions. He taught at Wellesley College, then at Princeton University from 1961 to 1982, and later at the University of Virginia. His most noted book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, appeared in 1979 and made him a central figure in debates about the point of philosophy.

The main ideas

  • Knowledge is not a mirror. The main target of his 1979 book is the picture of knowledge as representation, a mental mirroring of a world outside the mind. He argued that this picture sits at the root of many traditional problems in epistemology and metaphysics, and that we can let it go.
  • No privileged access. He gave up claims that the mind has a special power of direct access to things as they are in themselves, and offered an account of truth and meaning that starts from how people use language.
  • History, not essences. He was a historicist and an anti-essentialist, and thought that ideas should be understood through their place in the history of inquiry. Like Dewey, he saw no sharp breaks in that history.
  • Many teachers. He drew on Dewey, Hegel and Darwin, and on arguments from Sellars, Quine, Wittgenstein and Davidson.
  • Hope for a liberal society. He took the goal of politics to be a liberal society where there is freedom from pain and humiliation and where open-mindedness is practised. His later essays, gathered in Philosophy and Social Hope, argue for that kind of social hope.

What it looks like in practice

Picture two people arguing about whether a poem or a scientific theory is 'really' true. Instead of asking which of them has a better grip on how things are in themselves, Rorty would ask what each is trying to do and whether the conversation helps them get on. He would say the dispute is useful when it leads to new ways of speaking that people find worth keeping, and fruitless when it turns into a hunt for a final standard. This is an illustration of his outlook, not an example from his books.

Books and moments

  • Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) is his best-known work and the centrepiece of his criticism of modern philosophy.
  • Consequences of Pragmatism (1982) collects essays that develop the same critique.
  • Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) turns to the questions of liberal society and the self.
  • Philosophy and Social Hope (1999) collects his later essays for a wider public.

Questions and criticism

  • Friendly critics. Hilary Putnam, John McDowell and others took issue with parts of his view. It is fair to ask what is left of truth if it is only a word of praise for what we agree on.
  • Does giving up foundations weaken the case for liberalism? If nothing outside our practices backs up our values, it is fair to ask why a liberal society deserves loyalty over another.
  • Pragmatist or something else? He drew freely on many thinkers, and readers still discuss how closely he followed the pragmatists he admired.

Close neighbours

Rorty claimed Dewey as an ancestor, so the page on Dewey is the best companion, and the page on pragmatism describes the school he reshaped.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 9 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Philosophies they belong to or are close to

Who they connect to

Influenced by

  • Friedrich Nietzsche · Rorty took from Nietzsche the idea of remaking oneself and one's vocabulary.
  • G. W. F. Hegel · Rorty admired Hegel's view of philosophy as its own time grasped in thought.
  • John Dewey · Rorty called Dewey a hero and set out to renew his pragmatism.
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein · Rorty drew on the later Wittgenstein's view of language as tools and not a mirror.
  • Martin Heidegger · Rorty used Heidegger's criticism of the old idea that the mind mirrors reality.
  • W. V. O. Quine · Rorty used Quine's rejection of a sharp line between meaning and fact.

Reacted against

  • Immanuel Kant · Rorty rejected Kant's project of finding a fixed framework for knowledge.

Other American thinkers

Sources we used

  • Richard Rorty · Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, read on 9 October 2026
  • Rorty, Richard · Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, read on 9 October 2026
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