Applied Epistemology

Slate has found out.

I have to say that I'm impressed at the amount of posthumous publicity Rorty has gotten. I suspect it's because he was really the only professional American philosopher who still tried to address the educated lay audience. (Also, I suspect he was the only philosopher whose ideas were intelligible to the humanities majors who go on to write for culture mags such as Slate.) With Rorty's passing, only philosophers such as Dan Dennett, Colin McGinn, Simon Blackburn, and Jerry Fodor are the tenuous threads between academic philosophy and the larger public sphere. And none of them write as simply or with as much moxie as Rorty did. (Fodor comes closest, though he only writes pieces for British periodicals!)