Richard Rorty
Oxford
7 May 2003

Just as poetry in English is a conversation between Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Yeats, and the rest, so philosophy in the West is a conversation between Parmenides, Plato, Augustine, Hume, Hegel, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and the rest. To be a philosopher in our part of the world is to get in on that conversation.