A lovely appreciation:
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."
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Thanks for the interesting link to a site I had never seen before.
Ah, many of us suffer from the disease of being influenced by Heidegger. And those of us with the worst case of it are drawn to Rorty for obvious reasons. But I'd rather be ailed by Heidegger and Rorty than burdened with the metaphysician's futile quest for absolute truth.
Elsewhere on the internet, I posted the following in response to the statement that democracy is always temporary in nature, and that the masses, voting in their own self-interest, generate loose fiscal policy which collapses treasuries and leads back into bondage