 Rorty’s reading of earlier philosophers has always been unabashedly appropriative, and hence often controversial. His heterodox reading of Dewey and his generally dismissive attitude toward Peirce has also meant that Rorty found few friends among the keepers of the pragmatist tradition in the American academy. Prominent readers of the classical American pragmatists have expressed deep reservations about Rorty’s interpretation of Dewey and Peirce, in particular, and of his construal of the pragmatist movement in general (see, for instance, Misak, 2013.) Consequently, Rorty’s entitlement to the label “pragmatist” has been challenged. Haack’s strong claims on this score are notable, but there are many others. (See the discussions of Rorty in Alexander, 1987; Brodsky, 1982; Campbell, 1984; Edel, 1985; Gouinlock, 1995; Lavine 1995; R.W: Sleeper, 1986; as well as the essays in Langsdorf and Smith, 1995.) For Rorty, the key figure in the American pragmatist movement is John Dewey, to whom he attributes many of his own central doctrines. In particular, Rorty finds in Dewey an anticipation of his own view of philosophy as the facilitator of a humanist politics, of a non-ontological view of the virtues of inquiry, of a holistic conception of human intellectual life, and of an anti-essentialist, historicist conception of philosophical thought. To read Dewey his way, however, Rorty explicitly sets about separating the “good” from the “bad” Dewey (see “Dewey’s Metaphysics” in CP, and “Dewey between Hegel and Darwin” in TP). He is critical of what he takes to be Dewey’s backsliding into metaphysics in Experience and Nature, and has no patience for the constructive attempt of Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. Rorty thus imposes a scheme of evaluation on Dewey’s works which many scholars object to. Lavine, for one, claims that “scientific method” is Dewey’s central concept (Lavine 1995, 44). Sleeper holds that reform rather than elimination of metaphysics and epistemology is Dewey’s aim (Sleeper 1986, 2, chapter 6).