Too Much Heidegger

I received the news in an email almost exactly a year ago. As so often in recent years, Rorty voiced his resignation at the "war president" Bush, whose policies deeply aggrieved him, the patriot who had always sought to "achieve" his country. After three or four paragraphs of sarcastic analysis came the unexpected sentence: " Alas, I have come down with the same disease that killed Derrida." As if to attenuate the reader's shock, he added in jest that his daughter felt this kind of cancer must come from "reading too much Heidegger."
-- Jürgen Habermas in an obituary of Rorty

Well, amen to that. I know I'd die of something if I sat down to read Heidegger. It's a very nice obit. Habermas and Rorty were friends and each others best critics for most of their lives.

More things one can read and listen to by Rorty:

Here's a series of lectures and radio shows with Rorty. And here's a conversation between him, Hilary Putnam and James Conant. In both of these, just search the page for Rorty to find the right link.

Here's an essay by him called "Trotsky and Wild Orchids", a very funny personal essay which tracks his own development as a thinker through his Freudian obsession with orchids as a child.