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Obituary

Richard Rorty (1931-2007)

Gideon Calder reports after the death of the infamous pragmatist.

I once knew someone who, halfway through the introduction to Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) got so disgusted that he threw the book across the room. The episode was related with glowing pride to our philosophy reading group. This struck me as ironic. After all, we weren’t a ‘philosophy throwing group’, and it seemed odd that philosophers, of all people, should just junk ideas they weren’t keen on. Yet Rorty, who died recently at the age of 75, probably had his books thrown around more than any recent philosopher.

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