Richard Rorty's philosophical writing has spanned roughly forty years, in which he has made a very special case for a emacipative type of neo-pragmatism rising out of the early American philosophy of Emerson, Whitman, James, Pierce, and Dewey. These philosophers, along with Rorty, believe in a project that is America--a nation born out of European political philosophy, transformed by frontier/survivalist ethics, and renegotiated into the 'radical' philosophy of the mid-late Nineteenth Century. Both Rorty's predecessors and his contemporaries were working from the post-Kantian foundations of not only philosophy, but of the science that philosophy became in the late Nineteenth Century and into the Twentieth Century with the "scientification" of philosophy by people like Russell, Frege, Husserl, early Wittgenstein, Carnap, Kripke, etc. Though Rorty himself was trained as an "analytic philosopher" (designated by this turn towards philosophy as a "science," and by the general turn towards examining the structures of language that make up all accounts of inquiry by humans--be it mathematical, symbolic, logical, or ordinary). His time at Chicago was spent working on "the proper analysis of subjunctive conditional statements" and then he moved on to Yale where he found the grand, dramatic narrative of Hegel's Geist too easy to let go of. The beauty of that work, one which defined Continental philosophy, along with Heidegger, for the rest of the Twentieth Century, allowed Rorty to become romantic towards philosophy again. After receiving his Phd, Rorty taught at Princeton, where he was a very important analytic philosopher on the 'cutting' edge of vogue philosophical problems. Yet as Rorty himself describes, the minds going into philosophy were still top-notch, "but most of these minds [were] busy solving problems which no nonphilosopher recognizes as problems: problems which hook up with nothing outside the discipline. So what goes on in anglophone philosophy departments has become largely invisible to the rest of the academy, and thus to the culture as a whole."
Stagnant in pointless problems, Rorty moved to the University of Virginia to become University Professor inthe Humanities, which allowed him the freedom and leeway to "teach and write about anything I pleased, when and as I pleased." In this academic 'ideal' situation, Rorty wrote many of the books that have attracted him the largest audience outside of philosophy departments, and inside of English, Sociology, Anthropology, Education, and Rhetoric departments. Many critics dubbed this as the "postmodernist," or "relativist," or "deconstructionist" move in vogue at the time. These labels, though in today's academy (and ten years aago as well) were already well outmoded. Rorty's disdain for jargon and pomposity amongst the "deconstructionists" in humanities departments gained him few friends and many enemies both in philosophy departments (who saw him as a turncoat) and in the humanities. But Rorty continued on his trajectory that had driven him since his youth: "So, at 12, I knew the point of being human was to spend one's life fighting social justice."
This trajectory has led him to get more involved outside of the academy specifically and has allowed Rorty a wider audience in such publications as the New York Times Book Review, the Times Literary Supplement, the Nation, Dissent, the Atlantic, and many other more popular outlets. Here we see Rorty writing at his best--trying to convince people that America is not all that bad. Yes, he is a well-paid university professor; yes, he is a white male; yes, he is trained in a subject that has increasingly become seen as a smug, pretentious, pointless discipline--yet, he has hope, or at least can articulate a utopian vision that leaves behind the self-depricating criticisms of both the Left and the Right. I think that both of these terms should also be thrown out (to use a method that Rorty enjoys so much), and instead both the Left and the Right should rather instead be called Capitalists in search of the perfect market system . Rorty would probably not agree with my essentialism there, but i think he would be happy with the point--to create and invent new vocabularies (of which he talks much about in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity) that suit the needs of certain situations--thus langauge would cease to be something studied about in its use value, etc, but would become the tool that Rorty feels it is--one among many. Thus we come to Rorty's major works. They are various and span forty years of productive work. He is now a Professor of Comparative Literature and Philosophy at Stanford University.