I met him once at a lecture at my college, and loved the way he thought, taught and lived.  Coming from the philosophical tradition, he basically spent the 70s and 80s (and, well, the rest of his career) giving traditional “stump the freshman” philosophy a big fat middle finger, while at the same time used academic rigor and and open heart to follow in the footsteps of great American “doing real shit to help the real world” philosophers like Dewey and James, in basically creating a moral, right-thinking, good-deed doing society based on principles of humanity, entirely divorced from religion and “objective morality” thinking.

He was an a great thinker and an awesome, awesome human being.

Farewell, Richard Rorty.

The above is an awesome obituary which I’d urge people interested in him to give a look at. My highlights, which really summarize where he came from and what he stood for:

“Raised in a home where “The Case for Leon Trotsky” was viewed with the same reverence as the Bible might be elsewhere, Mr. Rorty pondered the nature of reality as well as its everyday struggles. “At 12, I knew that the point of being human was to spend one’s life fighting social injustice,” he wrote in an autobiographical sketch.

Russell A. Berman, the chairman of the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford University, who worked with Mr. Rorty for more than a decade, said, “He rescued philosophy from its analytic constraints” and returned it “to core concerns of how we as a people, a country and humanity live in a political community.”

…

“The widespread notion that the philosopher’s primary duty was to figure out what we can and cannot know was poppycock, Mr. Rorty argued. Human beings should focus on what they do to cope with daily life and not on what they discover by theorizing.”

-Andy