Richard Rorty, 75; Leading US Pragmatist Philosopher:

An heir to William James and John Dewey, Dr. Rorty advocated a philosophy known as pragmatism, which shunned what he considered a fruitless search to answer unknowable questions: What is the meaning of life? Do other people exist? He had rejected the field of analytic philosophy on the ground that it attempts to address those questions, which he largely considered a waste of time, and had created something akin to a hunt for timeless truths, another idea he strongly criticized.

His dismissal of analytic philosophy led some of his harshest critics, including Bernard Williams of Oxford University, to write that Dr. Rorty was a relativist who believed truth was dispensable. Dr. Rorty’s supporters saw an important distinction: that Dr. Rorty was carrying on the pragmatic tradition of seeing truth as something created by humans in their struggle to cope with the world around them and not simply eternal truths suddenly found by them.

Michael Williams, philosophy department chairman at Johns Hopkins University, said Dr. Rorty, one of his mentors, “taught the lesson there are no fixed and permanent foundations for anything, that anything could be changed. Where some see this as cause for despair, he saw this as cause for hope because it meant we could always do better. . . . He reveled in contingency,” what happens as a result of human progress.

Williams added: “Instead of trying to define the essence of human nature, Rorty thought we should creatively think up new possibilities for ourselves — what to be, how to live. He said we are not hostage to how things are. He spoke of pragmatism as a future-oriented philosophy.”