Educated at Chicago and Yale, Rorty taught at Wellesley College and Princeton, and was professor of humanities at the university of Virginia from 1982 until moving to Stanford as Professor of Comparative Literature in 1998. He was widely known as an analytic philosopher who turned against what he regarded as the traditional categories of concern in that tradition—truth, knowledge, objectivity and representation—and substituted a free-wheeling postmodernist version of pragmatism, linked with writers such as Heidegger and Gadamer, in which these topics are banished. Having risen above such concerns the liberal intellectual maintains an ironic and detached attitude even to his or her fundamental convictions. Rorty’s slash-and-burn attitude to most of the traditional categories of Western thought has not been followed by later pragmatists, who maintain more friendly relations with notions such as truth or representation, even if they prefer accounts of the use of terms that initially avoid them. Influential books included Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) and Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989). Collections of papers include Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (1991), Essays on Heidegger and Others (1991), Truth and Progress (1998), and Philosophy and Social Hope (2000).

http://www.phillwebb.net/History/TwentiethCentury/Pragmatism/Rorty/Rorty.htm A list of on- and offline resources on Rorty, including bibliographies and texts