Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

An attack, from inside analytic philosophy, on the idea that philosophy is a foundational discipline that judges the claims of other fields. Rorty traces this self-image to the picture of the mind as a great mirror containing representations of nature, some accurate and some not, and to the project of epistemology as the study of how to polish the mirror. Part One, 'Our Glassy Essence', argues that the mind–body problem rests on a seventeenth-century invention of 'the mind', and imagines the Antipodeans, a people who speak only of their neural states. Part Two uses Sellars's attack on the given and Quine's attack on analyticity to argue that justification is a social practice, not a relation between beliefs and privileged representations, a view Rorty calls epistemological behaviourism. Part Three replaces epistemology with hermeneutics and contrasts systematic philosophy with 'edifying' philosophy that keeps the conversation of mankind going. Rorty's heroes are Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Dewey. Critics accuse him of relativism and of misdescribing the tradition he rejects.

It is the classic argument that analytic philosophy's search for foundations was a mistake, and it opened a route from analytic philosophy back to pragmatism and continental thought.