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Human Rights

Richard Rorty On Rights

Patrícia Fernandes looks at Rorty’s idea for promoting human rights.

For his 1993 Oxford Amnesty Lecture, the American philosopher Richard Rorty presented a paper that would become one of his most popular texts: ‘Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality’. In it he argued for the following ideas: 1) We cannot justify human rights; 2) Reason is a useless apparatus to promote human rights; 3) We should concentrate our energies instead on sentimental education.

The Contingency of Reason

Richard Rorty (1931-2007)

To understand what Rorty meant by this, we need to go back to his first original book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). In it Rorty offered an analysis of the philosophical context of the second half of the Twentieth Century.

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