And Speaking of Charles Nelson Reilly’s Death…

I would have loved to have interviewed “Richard Rorty”:http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rorty/ as our next “Honorary _Heeb_,” but the great philosopher died Friday. Rorty was one of the first and greatest of the stodgy American analytic philosophers to see the value in European-style thinkers such as Heidegger, Derrida and Foucault. A serious postmodern thinker, Rorty bemoaned the stolid state of analytic philosophy and advised that we turn to literature for moral instruction. Rorty carried the torch of John Dewey as an engaged pragmatist and secular democrat. Long before “Sam Harris”:http://www.samharris.org/ and the “avenging atheists,”:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18508176/site/newsweek/ Rorty was describing religion as a “conversation stopper.” If you want an insightful analysis of the fallen state of the American Left, read Rorty’s “_Achieving Our Country_.”:http://www.amazon.com/Achieving-Our-Country-Leftist-Twentieth-Century/dp/0674003128 And do check out the _Progressive_’s “Danny Postel’s last interview with the badboy of American philosophy.”:http://www.progressive.org/mag_postel0607

What do you think?