Rorty (review)

While I might not have all the necessary background reading in language philosophy (Quine and Sellars, as well as Putnam and Davidson are notably absent from my purview), I admire Rorty's attempt to bring Marx, Freud and Sartre under the aegis of academia and its banner of legitimation. I finished Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature today, as well as John Dewey's Art as Experience, which I thought was a pleasure to read in comparison with what were in my opinion Rorty's misplaced attempts to reconcile revolutionary philosophers like Heidegger with the unhappy consciousness of reactionary philosophers like Kierkegaard. I see Rorty's writing of his book as stemming from a professional philosopher's desire to establish his own self-worth -- and that of his discipline -- amid a host of academic discourses, and I see his philosophical position as developing from a longing to negotiate the cultural policies that would carve out a place for philosophy without making a good deal of compromise; the afterward says that he wrote other books, which I would like to peruse, as he seems to be a thinker I could use as a friend.