Thanks for posting that - great read. And reading it took me back when I was lucky enough to take Richard Rorty's class (entitled something like Philosopy from Kant to 1900) my freshman year at Princeton. I remember the impact of his lectures about James and pragmaticism - I was a bit of a smart alek - convinced that there was only one right way of looking at the world and I (of course! :) knew what it was. James' Pragmatism and his concept of the cash value of ideas - the idea that you could ask how thinking and believing about the world in some particular way might be valuable to someone (in particular) as a part of measuring its "objective" value (it was a long time ago and I may be not giving a fully accurate report here of what James/Rorty actually said) had a big impact on me.
Rorty left the Philosophy department (for Virginia, I think) pretty soon after that class - due to the kind of disagreement between the analytical philosophers and him rumored to be at the root of the Bernstein/Yale break (Rorty didn't believe that logic was the core of philosophy).
And Rorty was a gifted lecturer with an extremely dry sense of humor. I think I laughed more often in that class than in any other that was to follow.
Rorty left the Philosophy department (for Virginia, I think) pretty soon after that class - due to the kind of disagreement between the analytical philosophers and him rumored to be at the root of the Bernstein/Yale break (Rorty didn't believe that logic was the core of philosophy).
And Rorty was a gifted lecturer with an extremely dry sense of humor. I think I laughed more often in that class than in any other that was to follow.