Richard Rorty, dead at 75

I really need to keep up with the news better. Richard Rorty, philosopher and literary theorist, died on Friday and I just read about it today on the New York Times website. This little snippet from the article does a good job summing Rorty up:

Mr. Rorty’s enormous body of work, which ranged from academic tomes to magazine and newspaper articles, provoked fervent praise, hostility and confusion. But no matter what even his severest critics thought of it, they could not ignore it. When his 1979 book "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" came out, it upended conventional views about the very purpose and goals of philosophy. The widespread notion that the philosopher’s primary duty was to figure out what we can and cannot know was poppycock, Mr. Rorty argued. Human beings should focus on what they do to cope with daily life and not on what they discover by theorizing.

Of course there’s much more to Rorty than this article can contain. Many of the philosophy and literature classes I took in high school touched on his theories, but I never did and "in-depth" study of his works, so I’m afraid I can’t go into much detail there.

But I will say that philosophy and literature go together like peanut butter and jelly. The two should be studied at the same time because many theories expressed in philosophy can be applied to literary studies.

Check out his groundbreaking book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (aff link).

And make sure to read the original New York Times article I used as a source:
Richard Rorty, philosopher, dies at 75

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