Richard McKay Rorty was an American philosopher. Educated at the University of Chicago and Yale University, he had strong interests and training in both the history of philosophy and contemporary analytic philosophy, the latter of which came to comprise the main focus of his work at Princeton University in the 1960s. He subsequently came to reject the tradition of philosophy according to which knowledge concerns correctly representing a world whose existence remains wholly independent of those representations. Rorty had a long and diverse academic career, including positions as Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia, and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. His best known books are Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Rorty saw the idea of knowledge as a "mirror of nature" as pervasive throughout the history of western philosophy. [More at Wikipedia]

October 4th, 1931 in New York City  /  Died:   Jun 8th, 2007