A friend of mine received his PhD in Philosophy from UCLA while Rorty taught there. And O certainly read some Rorty during my undergraduate days. Between the two, it's likely that I have been exposed to a good deal of Rorty. So are my own thoughts as original as they seem to me to be? Probably not.
In any case, I may be on a collision course with the late philosophy professor Richard Rorty as described here by Stephen Metcalf in the New Yorker:
The principal object of Rorty’s derision was neither identity politics nor the rise of an ignoble free-market right but a peculiar form of decadence, which his larger intellectual project aimed to counter. I knew Rorty a little; he was a shy and gentle man, a red-diaper baby who grew up to be a bird-watcher and a savorer of Proust and Kant in their original languages. But his loathing of the academic left was neither shy nor gentle. The “Foucauldian” left, he writes in “Achieving Our Country,” “represents an unfortunate regression to the Marxist obsession with scientific rigor.” In the specific case of Foucault, this involved locating the “ubiquitous specter” known as “power” everywhere, and conceding that we are without agency in its presence. “To step into the intellectual world which some of these leftists inhabit is to move out of a world in which citizens of a democracy can join forces to resist sadism and selfishness into a Gothic world in which democratic politics has become a farce,” he writes.
