Also from me, thank you for this passage. And upon reading how Rorty
defined Derrida, I have to admit that he is right. All that Rousseau,
only an unbelievably sentimentalist could go through every single word
the way Derrida did. I remember at a certain point I commented, "I
just do not know why he keeps on quoting Rousseau" who by the way
stuck with me as "the Romantic philosopher". Several times I had to go
back and correct myself with the Philosopher of Enlightenment, as our
("bucolic") Jean-Jacques is defined.
On 6/12/07, Dominic Fox <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I ended up in a very different camp, but Rorty's collection of essays
> "Contingency, Irony and Solidarity" was the second philosophy book I
> ever read (the first was Marcuse, "One Dimensional Man"). Later on I
> got stuck into "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature", which is a
> pretty serious book, and led me on to people like Stanley Cavell and
> Daniel Dennett who I would recommend to anyone, continentalists
> included.
>
> I love the late exchange between Rorty and Derrida, at a conference
> devoted to Derrida and American Pragmatism, where Rorty described
> Derrida as a sentimentalist who believed in happiness. Derrida, after
> thanking Rorty for his long interest in and engagement with his work
> (note: most Derrideans at the time thought Rorty had seriously got
> Derrida wrong) admitted that "I took my head in my hands" upon hearing
> this, but on further reflection had to agree: "I *am* very
> sentimental, and I *do* believe in happiness". Derrida was much
> happier, I think, with Rorty's reception of him than most Derrideans -
> in spite of some serious objections, which he also articulated...
>
> Rorty was a good guy.
>
> Dominic
>
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