39	THE VOLUNTEER FOR WEAK THOUGHT

Weak thought was officially born in autumn 1979, and that same winter I met Richard Rorty, a philosopher and a friend who became increasingly important for me.

I was invited to a meeting on the postmodern at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee (that’s right, Jeffrey Dahmer’s town).

Richard Rorty heard me speak and told me, “I’d like a copy of your paper.” I was flattered. But better yet, he gave me a copy of his book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.

I went back to Italy, finished my lectures at the university, left for Santorini on vacation, and read Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. I used to read in the morning before the sun got too high, and in the evening once the sun went down. Again on a splendid terrace. Again a fulguration, enormous enthusiasm. I discovered we were each saying more or less the same thing.

Rorty is one who maintains—and this is what made such an impression on me—that the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century were John Dewey, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Martin Heidegger. Nobody had ever put them together before. It was a revolutionary idea, enticing.

That was an important moment because I began to feel myself to be more than just some little Italian linked only to the Italian situation, someone—how to put it?—who cast a shadow internationally. If there was also someone in the United States saying the same things . . .

And from that was born a new effort to understand the post-analytics, those thinkers who emerged after analytic philosophy, and who still interest me a lot: Rorty in primis. But not just him.

If you think about what goes on in Italy, about the fact that it’s dangerous just to be mistaken for a “weak thinker,” you can imagine what it meant for me that Rorty—whose correct label is “neopragmatist”—chose to call himself a “weak thinker” at a conference in London.