Frank Kogan

Well, what is incorrectly projected backwards, according to Rorty, is Kant's belief that "Leibniz intellectualized appearances, just as Locke... sensualized all concepts of the understanding." And according to Rorty, "[Kant] thereby created the standard version of 'the history of modern philosophy' according to which pre-Kantian philosophy was a struggle between 'rationalism,' which wanted to reduce sensations to concepts, and 'empiricism,' which wanted the inverse reduction."

Don't think Rorty is saying that Kant thought that this was all that the rationalists and the empiricists were doing. But - Rorty is implying - this is how, after Kant, they get written into the story of philosophy. These are their crucial philosophical contributions to the story of philosophy (whereas mathematical coordinates and life, liberty, and property aren't).

And you're right that it isn't Kant's fault that subsequent historians and philosophers were gripped by the first Critique more than by anything else of Kant's, and historiography favored what led up to the first Critique. I will - very ignorantly, based on hints I got from reading Rorty - say that Kant is still coming at the tail end of philosophy's need to get out from under religion and make the world safe for science, but he's at the start of philosophy's narrowing itself into a profession that's distinct from, say, physics and psychology, and in need of something to do that physics and psychology can't, which is to ground and justify and pass judgment on the validity of what the sciences do in a way that the sciences themselves don't.

Btw, supposing Mirror is in your local library, it's easy to read, if not easy to understand.