- Lived:
- 1931–2007 · New York, Chicago, Princeton, Virginia, Stanford
- Tradition:
- American neo-pragmatism; anti-foundationalism — the analytic tradition's most famous defector
- The Big Idea:
- The mind is not a mirror of nature and knowledge is not a matter of accurate representation — so philosophy should stop hunting for foundations and start helping the human conversation go better.
- If you remember one thing:
- The best-trained analytic philosopher of his generation used the tradition's own weapons to argue that its central project — finding the foundations of knowledge — should be given up, and that philosophy's real job is helping us become kinder.