Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

Introduction

Rorty, trained in analytic philosophy and then teaching at Princeton, published the book in 1979. It reconstructs how, from Descartes through Locke to Kant, philosophy came to picture the mind as a mirror of nature and itself as the discipline that checks the accuracy of our representations. Using Sellars’s critique of the “myth of the given” and Quine’s rejection of the analytic–synthetic distinction, Rorty argues that this project has no foundation. He presents Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Dewey as the three most important philosophers of the century and recommends “edifying” conversation and hermeneutics in place of epistemology. The book caused a stir in Anglo-American philosophy and made Rorty the best-known voice of neopragmatism.

Connections

Builds on

• Experience and Nature1925 · John Dewey
• Two Dogmas of Empiricism1951 · W. V. O. Quine
• Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind1956 · Wilfrid Sellars

Criticizes

• Meditations on First Philosophy1641 · René Descartes
• Critique of Pure Reason1781 · Immanuel Kant

Taken up in

• Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity1989 · Richard Rorty

More works by Richard Rorty

• 1989Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity