R.I.P. Richard Rorty

I'm a little late, but at least this article from yesterday's Slate is timely.

From Richard Posner's entry:
Dick Rorty's most striking personal characteristic was a deep and genuine modesty, as an anecdote will illustrate. He had once written that if there was any hope for the world, it lay in the Third World. In an e-mail he told me that this was "the dumbest thing he had ever written." Sometime later I had occasion to quote in a book I was writing his statement that if there was any hope it lay in the Third World, and I wanted to add that he had retracted the statement in correspondence. I e-mailed him to ask whether I could do so. He e-mailed back that he would prefer me to state in my book that he considered the statement "the dumbest thing he had ever written." I did not.