I'll present this short commentary at a session of the Central Meeting later today:

I agree with Tadusz Szubka's thesis that there is a "partial" continuity between Rorty's work in the 1960s (esp. The Linguistic Turn) and his later pragmatic philosophy in which he repudiated "analytic" philosophy. I suggest additional support for the thesis of continuity comes from an examination of Rorty's undergraduate and graduate education. I then argue that the real puzzle about Rorty's intellectual development is not why he gave up on "analytic" philosophy – he had never been much committed to that research agenda, even before it became moribund–but why, beginning with Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (PMN), he gave up on the central concerns of philosophy going back to antiquity. Many contemporary philosophers influenced by Quine's attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction and Sellars' attack on "the Myth of the Given" (the two argumentative linchpins of PMN) didn't abandon philosophical questions about truth, knowledge, and mind, they just concluded those questions needed to be naturalized, to be answered in conjunction with the empirical sciences. Why didn't Rorty go this route? The paper concludes with some interesting anecdotes about Rorty that invite speculative explanations.

Professor Szubka's paper is not, to my knowledge, available on-line, though it is easy enough, I think, to follow my discussion even without having read Professor Szubka's piece.  I call attention to some interesting items from the Neil Gross biography of Rorty.  Here, for example, is what a young Richard Rorty wrote in his 'statement of interests' when applying to the PhD program at Yale:

I should like to acquire a better grasp of the alternatives on the nature and content of logic, and, most of all, to learn as much as I can about the specific differences and similarities between the methods and results of the predecessors and exponents of existentialism and those of the type of philosophy which, I think, reaches its culmination in Whitehead and his successors…Eventually…I should like to study in Europe and gain a more thorough and immediate acquaintance with recent European developments in philosophy.

Different times.