Objetividad relativismo y verdad richard rorty biography

First published Sat Feb 3, 2001; substantive revision Sat Jun 16, 2007

Richard Rorty (1931–2007) developed a distinctive and controversial brand of pragmatism that expressed itself along two main axes.

One is negative—a critical diagnosis of what Rorty takes to be defining projects of modern philosophy.

Objetividad relativismo y verdad richard rorty biography

The other is positive—an attempt to show what intellectual culture might look like, once we free ourselves from the governing metaphors of mind and knowledge in which the traditional problems of epistemology and metaphysics (and indeed, in Rorty's view, the self-conception of modern philosophy) are rooted.

The centerpiece of Rorty's critique is the provocative account offered in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979, hereafter PMN). In this book, and in the closely related essays collected in Consequences of Pragmatism (1982, hereafter CP), Rorty's principal target is the philosophical idea of knowledge as representation, as a mental mirro