Although Rorty always presented himself as a proud American philosopher, most of his US colleagues saw him as the personification of the European intellectual, not for praising classics from the continent, which, of course, is inevitable in our discipline, but rather for suggesting the abandonment of analytic philosophy.
This position, which for the most part relies on formal logic in measuring and solving problems, conquered the American academia to the extent that anyone interested in Dewey, Martin Heidegger, or Hans-Georg Gadamer was regarded as a subversive. Rorty became one even before 1979 when his most important book (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature) appeared while serving as the president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association.
During this period, as the letters published in his biography indicate, Rorty argued at both APA meetings and the department of philosophy of Princeton University (where he was teaching) that approaches other than analytic philosophy (such as deconstruction, poststructuralism, or hermeneutic philosophy) were not receiving enough recognition. Despite Rorty's international success, his criticism was regarded as a betrayal by most of his colleagues, and in the eighties he left the philosophy department and began teaching in English departments.
