Richard Rorty, người Mỹ, giáo sư chuyên ngành Văn học So sánh tại Stanford University, một trong những triết gia có ảnh hưởng lớn của thế kỷ XX, đã qua đời ngày 08 tháng Sáu 2007 vừa qua tại New York ở tuổi 75, do những biến chứng ung thư tụy.

Dù ở tác phẩm đầu, The Linguistic Turn (1967) chịu ảnh hưởng của triết học phân tích, nhưng sau đó ông được xem như người tiếp bước tryền thống triết học thực dụng của John Dewey và William James.

Những trang viết của Rorty trải trên một vùng rất rộng, thuộc nhiều phạm vi học thuật, trong đó các tác phẩm chính có thể kể đến là: Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), và Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989).

Những năm gần đây ông đưa dự báo về một nền “văn hóa văn chương”, theo đó tiểu thuyết và thơ ca sẽ là nguồn thể hiện những vấn đề đạo lý thay chỗ cho các bản văn triết học và tôn giáo, là những cái mà theo ông không nắm giữ đặc quyền và vị trí cao hơn trong việc tiếp cận chân lý.

Jürgen Habermas, một triết gia Đức cũng có nhiều ảnh hưởng, đã viết một lời điếu nhan đề Triết gia, thi sỹ và người bạn dành cho người vừa qua đời.

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Philosopher, poet and friend

I received the news in an email almost exactly a year ago. As so often in recent years, Rorty voiced his resignation at the "war president" Bush, whose policies deeply aggrieved him, the patriot who had always sought to "achieve" his country. After three or four paragraphs of sarcastic analysis came the unexpected sentence: " Alas, I have come down with the same disease that killed Derrida." As if to attenuate the reader's shock, he added in jest that his daughter felt this kind of cancer must come from "reading too much Heidegger."

Three and a half decades ago, Richard Rorty loosened himself from the corset of a profession whose conventions had become too narrow - not to elude the discipline of analytic thinking, but to take philosophy along untrodden paths. Rorty had a masterful command of the handicraft of our profession. In duels with the best among his peers, with Donald Davidson, Hillary Putnam or Daniel Dennett, he was a constant source of the subtlest, most sophisticated arguments. But he never forgot that philosophy - above and beyond objections by colleagues - mustn't ignore the problems posed by life as we live it.

Among contemporary philosophers, I know of none who equalled Rorty in confronting his colleagues - and not only them - over the decades with new perspectives, new insights and new formulations. This awe-inspiring creativity owes much to the Romantic spirit of the poet who no longer concealed himself behind the academic philosopher. And it owes much to the unforgettable rhetorical skill and flawless prose of a writer who was always ready to shock readers with unaccustomed strategies of representation, unexpected oppositional concepts and new vocabularies - one of Rorty's favourite terms. Rorty's talent as an essayist spanned the range from Friedrich Schlegel to Surrealism.

The irony and passion, the playful and polemical tone of an intellectual who revolutionised our modes of thinking and influenced people throughout the world point to a robust temperament. But this impression doesn't do justice to the gentle nature of a man who was often shy and withdrawn - and always sensitive to others.

One small autobiographical piece by Rorty bears the title 'Wild Orchids and Trotsky.' In it, Rorty describes how as a youth he ambled around the blooming hillside in north-west New Jersey, and breathed in the stunning odour of the orchids. Around the same time he discovered a fascinating book at the home of his leftist parents, defending Leon Trotsky against Stalin. This was the origin of the vision that the young Rorty took with him to college: philosophy is there to reconcile the celestial beauty of orchids with Trotsky's dream of justice on earth. Nothing is sacred to Rorty the ironist. Asked at the end of his life about the "holy", the strict atheist answered with words reminiscent of the young Hegel: "My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law."

The article originally appeared in German in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on June 11, 2007.

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(Theo The Sun, signandsignt.com, Wikipedia)