Philosophy and the mirror of nature
“Since the seventeenth century, discussion of the mind, of knowledge, and of philosophy has been dominated by the notion of representation. The mind is compared to a mirror that reflects reality; knowledge is concerned with the accuracy of these reflections; and the strategy employed to obtain this knowledge – that of inspecting, repairing, and polishing the mirror – belongs to philosophy. In a probing and wide-ranging critique of this imagery, Richard Rorty surveys its effects on philosophy, particularly on modern analytic thought, and advocates its “deconstruction.”Drawing on the criticism of the tradition offered by Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger, the author contrasts their “edifying” philosophy of Locke, Descartes, Kant, Russell, and Husserl. Rejecting the latter, he argues that the discovery of correspondences between thought or language and the world must be abandoned, and with it the idea of philosophy as centered in a theory of representation. Professor Rorty concludes that once epistemology (and such putative successors as philosophy of language or psycho-linguistics) are put aside, philosophy will no longer be thought of as providing a tribunal of pure reason which judges other areas of culture. The aim of “philosophy without mirrors,” he suggests, will be to continue the conversation which constitutes our culture, rather than to pronounce on its results from an ahistorical point of view.”- Publisher
Print Book, English, ©1979
Princeton University Press, Princeton, ©1979