Rorty was a great American philosopher, who deserves to be remembered alongside Pierce, James, and Dewey for a number of reasons.

Although I cannot go into his original contributions here, he prided himself on being a conversationalist, a thinker who linked up and weaved new ideas out of the ground layed by his forerunners (in a way this is his very model of truth as we put it together), and so I will simply note that he should be lauded for: Linguistically and conversationally bridging the divide between Anglo-American Analytical thinking and European Continental thinking; Writing beautifully in a way that nonspecialists can appreciate and be enlightened by (a very American ethic), i.e. making Hegel and Heidegger somewhat intelligible for English speakers; Sparking a revival in appreciation for the early pragmatists as the seminal American thinkers; Eminating a warmth and humanism rarely exposed amongst his famous European predecessors, the modern philosophers.

I thoroughly enjoy reading his work as pleasure in addition to enjoying its power to generate exciting new ideas. And that is perhaps the best compliment any philosopher can achieve.