The Leiter Report has a brief obit. Richard Rorty was a significant thinker, although I must say that what I learned from his work Philosophy and the MIrror of Nature, I had to unlearn later on. But that is the way of philosophical discussions.
More from Telos, courtesy of Mixing Memory.
I just heard from those who knew him that he died after a 15 month battle with pancreatic cancer. Until shortly before his death, he was quite active.
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Rorty, the American pragmatist philosopher, has died at the age of 75. I saw news of this via Arts and Letters Daily, which linked to a brief notice in Telos (a journal of political and social thought).
Rorty's most referenced work was 1979's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. His most recent…
Leiter reports that Benson Mates has died, and links to the UC Berkeley short obit:
The Department announces with great sadness the death, on May 13, 2009, of Prof. Emeritus Benson Mates. Born in 1919, Prof. Mates studied at the University of Oregon, completing the B.A. degree there in 1940 (in…
I just learned that Richard Rorty died Friday. I was a big fan of his work as an undergrad, and at that time both Consequences of Pragmatism and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity had a big influence on my thinking. I suppose they still do indirectly, though I'm less impressed with them now than I…
First, an obituary by his friend, Jürgen Habermas. It begins with a story of Rorty making light of the illness that ultimately killed him:
After three or four paragraphs of sarcastic analysis came the unexpected sentence: " Alas, I have come down with the same disease that killed Derrida." As if to…
I'm not exactly a fan of Rorty, but I'll still pay him respect. He was indeed a significant thinker, even if a lot of his though was horribly muddled and confused (IMO, at least).