Richard Rorty

Richard Rorty, born Richard McKay Rorty in 1931 and died in 2007, was an American philosopher who trained in the analytic tradition before becoming one of its most influential internal critics, developing a position often called neopragmatism. In his best known book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, published in 1979, he argued against the idea that the mind mirrors an external reality and that philosophy's task is to secure accurate representations of it, proposing instead that knowledge and truth are best understood as features of language and social practice rather than as correspondence to an independent world. Rorty drew heavily on the classical American pragmatists John Dewey and William James, and his later work extended this anti-representationalist stance into political and cultural writing, arguing for a pragmatic, historically contingent liberalism in place of philosophy grounded in claims to timeless objective truth.