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Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

  • Jan 18, 2021
  • Richard M. Rorty David Bromwich Michael Williams
  • 206 responses.

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature When it first appeared in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature hit the philosophical world like a bombshell In it Richard Rorty argued that beginning in the seventeenth century philosophers de

  • Title: Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
  • Author: Richard M. Rorty David Bromwich Michael Williams
  • ISBN: 9780691141329
  • Page: 485
  • Format: Paperback

    • When it first appeared in 1979, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature hit the philosophical world like a bombshell In it, Richard Rorty argued that, beginning in the seventeenth century, philosophers developed an unhealthy obsession with the notion of representation comparing the mind to a mirror that reflects reality Rorty s book is a powerful critique of this imagery anWhen it first appeared in 1979, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature hit the philosophical world like a bombshell In it, Richard Rorty argued that, beginning in the seventeenth century, philosophers developed an unhealthy obsession with the notion of representation comparing the mind to a mirror that reflects reality Rorty s book is a powerful critique of this imagery and the tradition of thought that it spawned Today, the book remains a must read and stands as a classic of twentieth century philosophy Its influence on the academy, both within philosophy and across a wide array of disciplines, continues unabated This edition includes new essays by philosopher Michael Williams and literary scholar David Bromwich, as well as Rorty s previously unpublished essay The Philosopher as Expert.

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    About "Richard M. Rorty David Bromwich Michael Williams"

    1. Richard M. Rorty David Bromwich Michael Williams

      Richard Rorty 1931 2007 developed a distinctive and controversial brand of pragmatism that expressed itself along two main axes One is negative a critical diagnosis of what Rorty takes to be defining projects of modern philosophy The other is positive an attempt to show what intellectual culture might look like, once we free ourselves from the governing metaphors of mind and knowledge in which the traditional problems of epistemology and metaphysics and indeed, in Rorty s view, the self conception of modern philosophy are rooted The centerpiece of Rorty s critique is the provocative account offered in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature 1979, hereafter PMN In this book, and in the closely related essays collected in Consequences of Pragmatism 1982, hereafter CP , Rorty s principal target is the philosophical idea of knowledge as representation, as a mental mirroring of a mind external world Providing a contrasting image of philosophy, Rorty has sought to integrate and apply the milestone achievements of Dewey, Hegel and Darwin in a pragmatist synthesis of historicism and naturalism Characterizations and illustrations of a post epistemological intellectual culture, present in both PMN part III and CP xxxvii xliv , are richly developed in later works, such as Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity 1989, hereafter CIS , in the popular essays and articles collected in Philosophy and Social Hope 1999 , and in the four volumes of philosophical papers, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth 1991, hereafter ORT Essays on Heidegger and Others 1991, hereafter EHO Truth and Progress 1998, hereafter TP and Philosophy as Cultural Politics 2007, hereafter PCP In these writings, ranging over an unusually wide intellectual territory, Rorty offers a highly integrated, multifaceted view of thought, culture, and politics, a view that has made him one of the most widely discussed philosophers in our time.

    206 Comments

    1. This is a difficult book to review. Rorty, you soon realize, is an exceptionally clever person. He seems to have all of philosophy at his fingertips: he presupposes a good knowledge, just to name the more important candidates, of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Dewey, Frege, Russell, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Moore, Heidegger, Sartre, Quine, Davidson, Feyerabend, Kuhn, Nagel, Derrida, Sellars, Strawson and Putnam. (I can, with considerable goodwil [...]

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    2. This is an essay which anybody who has ever regaled a professional philosopher should read. It will make you snort with laughter as Rorty tells you exactly how it is, these guys in their glass castles having obscure debates about nothing that matters, when we all know that philosophy is about the things that do matter. Well, it should be anyway, right? It's lost its way, it used to be vital, now it's irrelevant. We all know it except the professional philosophers and you have to wonder why they [...]

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    3. Rorty is not only a philosopher. He is also a man of literature. As such, he is concerned with telling a good story. This makes the book an absolutely gripping read (as far as a philosophy book can ever be). The problem with telling a story is that you can mistake your fictions for reality. Many readers have pointed out that weaving a narrative of heroes and anti-heroes can lead to misrepresentations. This, ironically, is Rorty's very point. Pretending to see unadulterated reality, as if through [...]

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    4. I have just finished reading this for the second time, having used it now twice as a book in my Metaphysics seminar (the first time was 17 years ago). I don't really like the book or its viewpoint, but it is a good object for reflection. The book itself offers a take on the history Western Philosophy as mostly a series of various attempts to see truth as a kind of mirroring and to anchor knowledge in correspondence with the world, and then to offer the author's contrasting view of truth as no mo [...]

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    5. This book was a landmark for me. I never would have been able to read Gadamer or Heidegger if I hadn't encountered Rorty first. He gives the best possible introduction to continental philosophy for anyone with a rigorous, empirical, "no bullshit" attitude. That said, I ultimately think the phenomenologists leave Rorty in the dust, but then you have to climb up ladders before you can kick them over.

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    6. It should be said, firstly, that I am an avowed pragmatist and as such am a welcome audience to a book such as this. Other readers who more specifically follow the Anglo-American philosophical tradition might feel rather differently. But I found it to be a spirited defense of an alternative to that particular philosophical mission, an alternative that quite simply throws out a lot of the major theoretical problems of the past 250 years as being language games.My principal failure as a reader was [...]

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    7. Ilmselt üks 20. sajandi filosoofia kõige parematest raamatutest. Või õigemini meeldivamatest, sest kuna ma ei kuulu professionaalsete filosoofide hulka, ei päde ka 'paremust' hindama. Aga just küsimused filosoofia süvenevast spetsialiseerumisest ja teaduslikkustumisest, epistemoloogia ja hermeneutika, loodus- ja humanitaarteaduste vahekorrast on minu jaoks selle raamatu kõige huvitavam osa.Rorty on suuremeelne filosoof, tal on paljude erinevate valdkondade suhtes avar vaatepiir. Ei nähv [...]

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    8. Really Interesting. I'm a bit skeptical of Rorty's take on the history of Philosophy, it seems to me to be a masterwork of editing, rather than a clear story about how philosophy has progressed. Nevertheless, I think that there is a pretty interesting case made against correspondence theory. Of particular value are the last two chapters on Hermeneutics vs. Epistemology, and the role of the philosopher as concerned with "edification."

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    9. Recommended for people who have taken the time to learn the language of hardcore analytic philosophy but want to dissolve the problems anyway. The middle 200 pages of this were a real slog - his impulse is more moral than philosophical, but he pays lip-service to the analytic tradition by using it to prove, basically, that everybody between Descartes and Dewey was a big dum-dum.

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    10. A mind-blowing work of philosophy that spells the end of an era: epistemology and for that matter, analytic philosophy. If you're into late 20th century philosophy you can't go wrong with Richard Rorty.

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    11. I’m apprehensive/skeptical about it but all of the hullabaloo seems worth checking out all the same, even if only to know precisely what’s wrong with Rorty’s take. From a film on Rorty:youtube/watch?v=Q7lB_w&youtube/watch?v=GlrEbf

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    12. sinto que maior parte deste livro me passou ao lado porque não tenho o tipo de background em leituras filosóficas necessário para o compreender na íntegra mas achei que traz ao de cima ideias e questões interessantes e se esforça minimamente para se fazer entender para leigos como eu.

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    13. Fantastic. Redescribes the history of philosophy in light of the criticisms of Wittgenstein, et. al. and presents an alternative vision of a philosophy based on conversation rather than epistemology.

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    14. Rorty's updating of Pragmatism includes discussions of how the views of Heidegger and Wittgenstein intersect with that tradition.

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    17. There is one big bone to pick for me with Rorty's book. (Only one? Well, only one that I feel like mentioning.) It comes in his early chapters about the "mind body problem." Rorty insists there is no real problem and that the problem is just an issue of language. Rorty introduces the thought experiment of an alien race that are pure physicalists. Instead of saying, "I feel pain" they say, "my c-fibers are being stimulated." Rorty insists there is no way of knowing whether they really feel pain o [...]

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    18. This book sat on my shelf for a few years before I decided to read it, but now that I've read it once, I can see returning to it again. Rorty's project in this work is to move away from the view of philosophy as a discipline which acts to establish timeliness standards of rationality, truth and knowledge that transcend all other disciplines (ie physics, psychology) and can adjudicate knowledge claims that arise between these disciplines. Instead, philosophy should be seen as one discipline among [...]

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    19. There was some tough going in the second chapter when Rorty uses the metaphor of Alien Anitpodeans who can read their own brain chemistry. But, the last few chapters were excellent. I recommend listening to the "Partially Examined Life" podcast as one reads the book.

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    22. As a major best-seller with numerous in-depth reviews out there, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature hardly needs me to explicate in general so I will do so in particular for those who care how this book and others have contributed to my own writer’s philosophy which I have variously termed “literary survival” and “resonance.”Rorty attacked analytical philosophy’s obsession with the image of the mirror of nature at the cost of recognizing the human nature of philosophical and, indeed [...]

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    23. Since Plato, philosophy has been concerned with getting beyond mere appearance in order to access the intrinsic nature of reality. For thinkers like Descartes and Kant, the ability to perform this feat is what defines humans as something distinct and special within the animal kingdom. However, Darwin made this position increasingly untenable by clarifying our bond to the natural world. Richard Rorty has now come to draw out the philosophical conclusions of such a tie. Beginning with an explorati [...]

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    24. The most important work of contemporary philosophy I read as a student. Rorty attempts to show a common pathway between the American, British and Continental traditions in 20th century philosophy. An ambitious project without doubt, but part of Rorty's appeal is that he's more than happy to tilt at windmills. Does he succeed?If the measure of success is to have generated conversation between these previously three isolated camps then the answer is a resounding yes. There are certainly details th [...]

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    25. I give 5 star reviews to anything I've read that made me seriously reflect on an issue rather than just being an interesting read. Good or bad, right or wrong, Rorty made me do that with this book.Part-analytic, part-continental, and attempting to dismiss those unhelpful titles in the process, Rorty dismantles the history of epistemology as the perceived backbone of modern thought. He not only tries to show how the particular concerns of our day have emerged from some specific moves in philosoph [...]

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    26. Five stars doesn't mean I agree with the whole book, naturally. But I really love Rorty's style here. Big ideas, challenging ideas, yet as a non-specialist I was able to follow much (dare I say most?) of what he wrote. I'm also very sympathetic to his argument, that philosophy needs to abandon its quest to be the grounding mode of inquiry for all else, and the related argument that all modes of knowing need to strive for humility and recognition of the fact that they are ways of knowing and (alm [...]

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    27. See review at: thesatirist/books/mirrThe chief target of Rorty's work is the notion that epistemology is the arbiter of what is rational in Western cultures. He sees this as an outgrowth of Descartes' project of grounding the new science on a new base of certainty. This new base was the idea of mind, a somewhat ineffable entity that "mirrors" reality with various degrees of accuracy. Kant embellished this notion by describing mind as something that adds to reality in the process of creating know [...]

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    28. Rorty's book is a must read if one wants a cogent critique of traditional philosophy, in light of American pragmatism (Dewey, Williams, etc.), Wittgenstein, and Heidegger. Rorty's book gives a perspicuous account of the history of philosophy (in terms of empistemology, the mind, rationality, etc.) and in his conceptual clarification shows the import of some of the ideas, while discarding most of them in a thoroughly pragmatist fashion. Although, as a Wittgensteinian, I don't approve of the way i [...]

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    29. A beautiful, fat book to disagree with. Maybe Rorty says the outlandish things he does, e.g that the mind and language are just inventions, that we need to get rid of epistemology, strictly for an edifying purpose —much like Kierkegaard's indirect communication, like the socratic midwifery in Plato's dialogues—to confront the reader, to get the reader into a position where she must face the problems on her own terms, independent of the reigning vocabularies. Is this possible? If so, what wou [...]

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    30. It's a rare philosopher who can talk about the commonality among Martin Heidegger, John Dewey and Ludwig Wittgenstein, but Rorty does it. He argues the counterintuitive point that there is no truth out there (contrary to the X-files), which leads to his being charged with being a relativist. He is better than that, however, and finds a pragmatic middle path between absolutism and relativism.

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