Pack Thinkers

20th century · 1931–2007

Who influenced Richard Rorty?

Influences

Philosophy without mirrors — truth as what your community lets you get away with.

Richard Rorty was influenced by John Dewey and Ludwig Wittgenstein. That is 2 lines of the 448 documented lines of influence between the 279 thinkers on this map.

Read on Wikipedia See the whole map

Who was Richard Rorty?

Richard Rorty taught at Princeton, Virginia and Stanford, and his best-known books are Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Consequences of Pragmatism (1982) and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989).

He rejected the old idea that knowledge means accurate inner representations of an outside world. Knowledge, he argued, is a matter of language, and since vocabularies are made by people, so are truths. He called the resulting attitude "ironism": knowing that your beliefs depend on your time and place, yet still holding beliefs worth acting on.

Summarized from the lead of the Wikipedia article.

Who influenced Richard Rorty?

2 direct influences on this map, earliest first.

The line of teachers behind Richard Rorty

The longest documented line of influence ending at Richard Rorty runs 27 generations back, to Thales of Miletus.

  1. Thales of Miletus
  2. Anaximenes of Miletus
  3. Anaxagoras
  4. Socrates
  5. Antisthenes
  6. Diogenes of Sinope
  7. Crates of Thebes
  8. Zeno of Citium
  9. Seneca
  10. Tertullian
  11. Augustine of Hippo
  12. Anselm of Canterbury
  13. Peter Lombard
  14. Thomas Aquinas
  15. René Descartes
  16. Thomas Hobbes
  17. Baruch Spinoza
  18. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
  19. Christian Wolff
  20. Immanuel Kant
  21. Johann Gottlieb Fichte
  22. F. W. J. Schelling
  23. Georg W. F. Hegel
  24. T. H. Green
  25. F. H. Bradley
  26. Bertrand Russell
  27. Ludwig Wittgenstein
  28. Richard Rorty

Two steps away from Richard Rorty

Indirect influences

Contemporaries of Richard Rorty

Thinkers on this map born within 25 years of Richard Rorty, with no direct line between them.

Richard Rorty by the numbers

Direct influences
2
Direct followers
0
Thinkers upstream
122
Thinkers downstream
0
Wikipedia languages
43 — #57 of 84 among 20th-century philosophers
Card rarity
Rare

Questions about Richard Rorty

Who influenced Richard Rorty?
John Dewey and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Who did Richard Rorty influence?
No later thinker on this map is recorded as drawing directly on Richard Rorty.
When did Richard Rorty live?
1931–2007. The map files Richard Rorty under the 20th century.
How rare is the Richard Rorty card?
Wikipedia carries an article on Richard Rorty in 43 languages, which makes it a Rare card. Legendary starts at 100 languages, Epic at 50 and Rare at 25.

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