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June 11, 2007

RIP Richard Rorty

Sad to hear, but the philosopher Richard Rorty died on June 8th. I remember struggling to get to grips with his writing for years - his work on human rights (especially a lecture delivered as a fundraiser for Amnesty) was always particularly interesting. Adding the finishing touches to my PhD at the moment, I'm still trying to respond to Rorty’s thought - in particular, to his argument that it is strange for Lyotard to abandon the project of universal history and yet discover world-historical significance in changes such as the new information-processing technologies (Rorty 1992, 69). Thinking back over Rorty's work, he raises a number of very good, very important questions - which I'm sure people much more significant than me will be able to benefit from for years to come.

Rorty, R. (1992) "Cosmopolitanism Without Emancipation: A Response to Lyotard," in S. Lash and J. Friedman, eds., Modernity and Identity, Oxford: Blackwell.

Posted by jon_mendel at June 11, 2007 12:58 PM

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