Abstract
An accessible overview of the work of one of our most influential living philosophers, as part of the popular Great Philosophers series. Richard Rorty is often cited as the most prominent philosophical defender of postmodernism. Best known for his unusually readable books and articles on philosophy -- most notably Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) -- Rorty has for some years now been a wide-ranging public intellectual, unwilling to be confined within the boundaries of academe.