Lasting Memories

Richard Rorty
Oct. 4, 1931-June 8, 2007
Stanford, California

Richard Rorty, a Stanford University professor emeritus of comparative literature, died at his campus home June 8, 2007, from complications of pancreatic cancer. He was 75.

Rorty spent most of his academic career as a philosophy professor but joined the Stanford faculty in 1998 as a professor of comparative literature.

He was one of the best-known and widely read philosophers of the late 20th century.

"He was such an unbelievably captivating presence as a lecturer and as a writer, and he was a model citizen," said Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, a Stanford professor of literature. "He always had these large classes of undergraduates. He had this huge, high opinion of the students here." Rorty was a central figure in the debate over the value of philosophy as a means of finding objective truth. "Philosophy is a tradition of overlapping texts," he said at a campus talk in 2001. "It's not a scientific discipline."

His questions about the value of philosophy made him a controversial figure.

"He put a bug in everyone's ear," said Jerome Schneewind, a longtime colleague and professor emeritus of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University.

Rorty was born on Oct. 4, 1931, in New York City. He enrolled at the University of Chicago when he was 15 and earned a bachelor's degree there in 1949 and a master's degree in philosophy in 1952. He earned a doctorate degree from Yale University in 1956.

After spending two years in the Army, he taught at Wellesley from 1958 to 1962, then joined the faculty at Princeton University, where he taught until 1982. He was on the faculty of the University of Virginia from 1982 until he came to Stanford in 1998.

He published his best-known book, "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature," in 1979.

Rorty is survived by his wife, Mary Varney Rorty, a biomedical ethicist at Stanford; daughter, Patricia Rorty of Berkeley; and sons, Jay Rorty of Santa Cruz and Kevin Rorty of Richmond, Va. He is also survived by his first wife, Amelie Rorty of Boston, Mass.