Amélie Rorty


Amélie Oksenberg Rorty is a Belgian-born American philosopher known for her work in the philosophy of mind, history of philosophy, and moral philosophy.

Career

Rorty received her B.A. from the University of Chicago in 1951, M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale University in 1954 and 1961 respectively, and an M.A. from Princeton University in anthropology. She began her academic career at Wheaton College , then began teaching at Rutgers in 1962 and taught there through to 1988, by which time she had achieved the rank of distinguished professor. She was also professor in the history of ideas at Brandeis University from 1995–2003, and from 2008–2013 was visiting professor at Boston University. , she will be a visiting professor at Tufts University. She is also a lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard School of Medicine. Rorty is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships over the course of her career: Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Studies, King's College, Cambridge, Institute for Advanced Study, John Simon Guggenheim, Woodrow Wilson Center, and the National Humanities Center.

Work

Rorty has primarily worked on problems in moral psychology and moral education. She is especially interested in the many distinctive –-and often conflicting—functions of morality as a social practice, as it sets prohibitions, projects ideals, defines duties, characterizes virtues. Exploring the dark side of some of the virtues—courage as bravado, integrity as moral narcissism, the ambivalence of love--, she has also analyzed the advantages of resistance to the obligations of morality: the benefits of self-deception, the lures of moral weakness, the wisdom of ambivalence, the hidden rationale of allegedly irrational emotions. She approaches many of these issues historically and anthropologically She is presently finishing a book provisionally entitled On the Other Hand: The Ethics of Ambivalence.
Rorty is the author of over 120 scholarly articles and the author or editor of more than a dozen scholarly books of original essays. A monograph, Mind in Action: Essays in Philosophy of Mind, was published by Beacon Press in 1988. She also edited and contributed to Explaining Emotions, Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, and co-edited Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima with Martha Nussbaum. She initiated and served as general editor of Modern Studies in Philosophy and of Major Thinkers. Other notable books she edited include The Many Faces of Evil, The Identities of Persons and The Many Faces of Philosophy.

Personal life

Oksenberg Rorty, daughter of Polish Jews Klara and Israel Oksenberg, was born in Belgium and emigrated with her parents to Virginia, where she was raised on a farm. She enrolled at a young age at the University of Chicago, and went on to pursue a doctorate at Yale, where she married Richard Rorty, a fellow graduate student. They had a son, Jay, and divorced in 1972. She wrote about her upbringing in “Dependency, Individuality and Work.” and in "A Philosophic Travelogue," The Dewey Lecture, American Philosophical Association, Proceedings and Addresses, vol. 88, 2014.

Additional awards and fellowships