Richard Rorty, 75; Leading U.S. Pragmatist Philosopher

He spoke of hoping to find a way to balance this appreciation of pure beauty with his parents' emphasis on intellectual purity -- and he described philosophy as a way to work through his competing beliefs.

A precocious thinker, Dr. Rorty entered the University of Chicago at 15 after skipping several grades. He told London's Guardian newspaper, "I escaped from the bullies who regularly beat me up on the playground of my high school, bullies who, I assumed, would somehow wither away once capitalism had been overcome."

At Chicago, he immersed himself in the Great Books program that was the school's signature offering for undergraduates. For a time, he once wrote, he admired Platonic thought because it "had all the advantages of religion, without requiring the humility which Christianity demanded, and of which I was apparently incapable."

By 1952, he had completed undergraduate and master's degrees in philosophy from Chicago and went on to receive a doctorate in philosophy from Yale University in 1956.

After Army service, he taught at Wellesley College and then at Princeton from 1961 to 1982. He was the Kenan professor of humanities at the University of Virginia from 1982 to 1998, when he retired for the first time. He accepted a post-retirement teaching assignment at Stanford as a professor of comparative literature and retired again in 2005.

He was a restless intellectual for much of his career. While editing the 1967 book "The Linguistic Turn," he expressed doubts about the idea that analytic philosophy had made great progress by recasting traditional questions about the relation between thought and reality as questions about how language manages to represent the world.

Dr. Rorty saw such ideas as rephrasing the same old questions that he considered as having outlived their usefulness.

Starting in the early 1970s, he began to break from mainstream analytic philosophy in general, and this isolated him from many of his Princeton colleagues who continued to see analytic streams of thought as vibrant.

His 1979 book, "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature," advanced many of his controversial beliefs. The book sought to dispense with what he considered the grandiose and fruitless attempts to seek out the foundations of knowledge and ethics -- presented over the years as timeless truths. Instead he wanted to focus on what was often called a nonfoundationalist philosophy that combined teachings of Dewey, Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

In later years, Dr. Rorty's books "Contingency, Irony and Solidarity," "Achieving Our Country" and "Philosophy and Social Hope" used similar arguments to discuss the nature of liberalism and how democracy can thrive through pragmatic thought. This wound up addressing a spectrum of relevant topics from feminism to human rights and how humans have found new ways to treat one another as needs have arisen.

Regarded in some circles as an intellectual superstar, Dr. Rorty remained a reserved, almost shy figure in person. He was known to reply courteously to nearly all his mail, from everyone from undergraduates to fellow philosophers who criticized him.

He could be a skeptical, self-deprecating thinker who had a vague sense that his own contribution to modern philosophy might someday be seen as a passing phase, that in the last analysis, there is no last analysis.

In private, he traveled from Australia to the Brazilian rain forest to indulge an interest in bird-watching.

His marriage to philosopher Amelie Oksenberg Rorty ended in divorce.

Survivors include his wife of 34 years, biomedical ethicist Mary Varney Rorty of Palo Alto; a son from his first marriage, Jay Rorty of Santa Cruz, Calif.; two children from his second marriage, Patricia Rorty of Berkeley, Calif., and Kevin Rorty of Richmond; and two grandchildren.