 However, critics are not concerned only with what they see as a misguided view of belief, truth, and knowledge, whether relativist, subjectivist, or idealist in nature. An important reason for the high temperature of much of the debate that Rorty has inspired is that he appears to some to reject the very values that are the basis for any articulation of a philosophical view of truth and knowledge at all. As Engel emphasizes, Rorty is indeed critical of the role of argument in intellectual progress, and he is dismissive of the very idea of theories of truth, of knowledge, of rationality, and the like. Philosophers such as Hilary Putnam and Susan Haack, who shared Rorty’s view that analytic philosophy would do well to incorporate the lessons of American pragmatism, focused their criticisms on exactly this aspect of Rorty’s views. Haack, in particular, frames her attacks on Rorty along these lines in moral terms; to her mind, Rorty’s efforts to abandon the basic concepts of traditional epistemology are symptoms of a vulgar cynicism, which contributes to the decline of reason and intellectual integrity that Haack and others find to be characteristic of much contemporary thought. The charge of intellectual irresponsibility is sometimes raised, or at last implied, in connection with Rorty’s use of historical figures. Rorty’s reading of Descartes and of Kant in PMN have often been challenged, as has his more constructive uses of Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. The kind of appropriation of other writers and thinkers that Rorty performs will at times seem to do violence to the views and intentions of the protagonists. Rorty, however, is quite clear about the rhetorical point and scholarly limitations of these kinds of redescriptions, as he explains in “The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres” (Rorty, 1984).