Pascal Engel (Paris/Sorbonne) summarizes it well:
"[The editors] identify correctly the difficulties of criticizing Rorty and of playing with him the usual game of exchanging arguments. In the first round, Rorty attempts to undercut some traditional philosophical thesis – Platonism, Foundationalism, Representationalism, etc. (always a capital letter!) – with the intention to show that a) everyone in the tradition and on the contemporary scene more or less subscribes to it, b) that it rests upon some mythological conception (e.g. the Given, Reality in itself) or upon some false dualism which has been debunked by some Great Figure (e.g.: ' Since Heidegger, Dewey and Davidson we know that…'), or c) by taking an extreme counterposition, 'a tactic that seems to suggest that all positions on the topic are somewhat arbitrary' (p.30). If the opponent protests that the so-called thesis has been caricatured, and that one can nevertheless give some reasonable defense of the attacked thesis, free of the so-called mythological implications, then Rorty redescribes his opponent’s position to make it trivially true or outright false. Or he practices ignoratio elenchi. In the second round, when the opponent objects that this is not good argument, then Rorty admits that he does not care for argument, which is useless and counterproductive and claims that what matters is only the attempt to demythologise and to put forward new ways of thinking. And he adds that in so objecting the opponent is in the grip of one of the mythologies and wrong dualisms that he is denouncing - a belief in some antecedently given Truth of the Matter or some Objective Point View. The game can go on, without there being anything much to do but to admire the artist."
Actually there is another option: stop playing. Surely this paragraph well captures why the vast majority of philosophers have stopped reading Rorty.
UPDATE: Keith DeRose (Yale, Philosophy) points out to me an amusing and sharp review of several Rorty-related books by Jay Rosenberg (North Carolina, Philosophy), which is available to JSTOR users here.
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