The sarcastic liberal - Richard Rorty

In "Intellectual Biography" written by Rorti on April 16, 2007 (less than two months before his death on June 8 of the same year), he said while talking about his beginnings: "I have spent my life exploring in libraries, driven by hope that a fierce book of imagination, completely authentic, will lay me down—transform me. And every time such a book fascinates me, I come across another book, difficult to reconcile with the first. So I try to bridge the gap between them, to find ways to rephrase what is said in each of them in a way that permits what is said in the other, so I can do what Gadamer calls 'fusion of horizons.'"