What in the hell …

Not his political views, that’s for sure. Still it does make me sad he’s died, I’ve been wanting to comment for a while but haven’t had time. I read Rorty and Foucault (the former more than the latter) at the same time, as Hegelianism washed out from under my feet (my dive into that resulting from chasing after a certain marxism while running from another). It was a heady time, such that I can’t be objective. Still, there are clearly some virtues of Rorty that are not reducible to my own circumstances of encounter.
For instance, according to Dennett, Rorty had “nuanced and defensible position[s] to offer to anybody who would join open-mindedly in discussion, and he had very high standards for what counted as a worthy move in the “conversation” he urged philosophers to engage in. (I remember fondly one time we sat together at a UNESCO conference listening to some very flowery French philosophers holding forth in typical Gallic fashion, and he leaned over and whispered to me, “They think they’re thinking!” But he was equally unimpressed with the high-tech arms races of argument and counterexample flourishing in many quarters of analytic philosophy.)” (via.)