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Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature | 
 enlarge | Author: Richard Rorty
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
Buy New: $15.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  13 reviews
Sales Rank: 55043
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 424
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 8.5 x 5.5 x 1
ISBN: 0691020167
Dewey Decimal Number: 190
EAN: 9780691020167
ASIN: 0691020167
Publication Date: January 1, 1981
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Product Description
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature hit the philosophical world like a bombshell. Richard Rorty, a Princeton professor who had contributed to the analytic tradition in philosophy, was now attempting to shrug off all the central problems with which it had long been preoccupied. After publication, the Press was barely able to keep up with demand, and the book has since gone on to become one of its all-time best-sellers in philosophy. Rorty argued that, beginning in the seventeenth century, philosophers developed an unhealthy obsession with the notion of representation. They compared the mind to a mirror that reflects reality. In their view, 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. Rorty's book was a powerful critique of this imagery and the tradition of thought that it spawned. He argued that the questions about truth posed by Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and modern epistemologists and philosophers of language simply couldn't be answered and were, in any case, irrelevant to serious social and cultural inquiry. This stance provoked a barrage of criticism, but whatever the strengths of Rorty's specific claims, the book had a therapeutic effect on philosophy. It reenergized pragmatism as an intellectual force, steered philosophy back to its roots in the humanities, and helped to make alternatives to analytic philosophy a serious choice for young graduate students. Twenty-five years later, the book remains a must-read for anyone seriously concerned about the nature of philosophical inquiry and what philosophers can and cannot do to help us understand and improve the world.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 8 more reviews...
 Rorty Basically Upholds a Negative Holism Here October 18, 2008
Given that cultural artifacts don't mirror reality then cultural artifacts can't be criticized on the basis of not mirroring reality as criticsim is unable to mirror reality in order to point out the lacunae of the cultural aritifact. Basically according to Rorty then all cultural artifacts are negated. Criticism is unable to be correct or incorrect vis-a-vis the cultural artifact and reality but rather criticism is only justified if it serves a holistic negative dialectic, there being no islands of accuracy as cultural artifacts always err. Rorty's postmodernism is clearly Hegelian of course. With Rorty as with Hegel the world is being negated a whole and that is the only acceptable stand. There is an out, of course to the negative holism of Hegel and Rorty. If a cultural artifact is unable to mirror reality one is left with what is in the frame. One addresses the work rather than continually gets in one's two cents worth about the course of history. Rorty's work doesn't lead to a pragmatism about a better approach to an improved school system, for example, but rather inevitably leads to 'great politics' of the postmodernist sort with a world disorganized and an avant-garde beholding the Absolute amongst the ruins.
Good Read for Students of Analytic Philosophy September 10, 2008
Published in 1981 Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (PMN) has become something of a classic in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. As someone who had, until that point, largely worked within the analytic tradition Rorty's criticism of many of the tenants of Anglo-American philosophy was seen by some commentators as near heretical.
PMN is a wide-ranging and meticulously referenced commentary on mid-twentieth century analytic philosophy. Though Rorty discusses a range of inter-related issues with great alacrity, his criticism is primarily focused on epistemology. In particular, Rorty is critical of what is often referred to as representational - the contention that we do not have direct access to reality, but, only to indirect representations of that reality in our minds. According to Rorty this view has been detrimental by causing philosophers to seek out criteria for assessing and improving these representations. He contends that this search for transcendental objective knowledge is misguided. Instead Rorty argues for a deflationary, or what he calls an edifying or conversational approach wherein truth/knowledge is limited to specific social groups or language games - as he pithily remarks truth is what your friends will let you get away with. As a result of PMN, Rorty has been criticized by many within the Anglo-American tradition as a relativist. While it is clear that, at least in a broad ontological sense, he is a relativist much of this criticism seems overstated. While I disagree with some of his key presuppositions (e.g. physicalism), his position given this worldview seems quite consistent. Indeed, theistic commentators have often remarked that in a physicalist/atheistic worldview notions of objective truth or knowledge are illusory.
Although PMN is a worthwhile read, potential readers are advised that it is nuanced and sophisticated discussion - part of an internecine debate amongst academic philosophers. If one is not well versed in the Modern Western tradition (Descartes, Locke, Kant, ETC.), let alone more recent commentators such as Wittgenstein, Quine, Sellers, Putnam, the discussion will likely be incomprehensible. Overall, a good book by a broad and interesting thinker. Recommended for students of modern analytic philosophy
 Can't anyone think anymore? December 23, 2007
2 out of 11 found this review helpful
Rorty writes well and if you met him, you know he was a clever guy and a nice guy. But as a philosopher he is a good gardener. If you go through this book slowly and take the time to deconstruct what he is saying, you will find very little there that is knew, interesting or correct. This is what philosophy has come to in today's world: people who have nothing to say, and nothing to offer, yet lack the honesty to admit it, engaging in intellectual games in an attempt to gain acclaim. Rorty gained that acclaim, within a small circle, but it is all grounded in illusion.
 Smashing the Mirror of Nature September 19, 2007
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
"Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" is Richard Rorty's magnum opus, his manifesto for a new philosophy and a new philosophical language. Taking aim at some thousands of years of philosophical tradition, Rorty argues that the concept of representation ought to be given up entirely, and with it all epistemology and all metaphysics.
A big part of the book consists of a very in-depth discussion of the traditions in epistemology and metaphysics (including ontology), and where the idea of the point of epistemology comes from in the first place. Our intuitions of our minds as "Mirrors of Nature", reflecting the Real out there in whatever imperfect way it impresses itself upon us, are traced by Rorty to the Cartesian revolution in philosophy. The whole ensemble of philosophical thought from Descartes (but inspired already by Plato), via Locke, Spinoza, Kant all the way to Frege, Russell and the early Wittgenstein and modern "analytical philosophy" is to blame for this popular view, but Rorty launches a convincing and masterfully written attack on precisely this view. Epistemology, the 'linguistic turn', ontology, and so on, Rorty argues, have never given an adequate answer to what it means exactly to say that an idea or meaning "represents" reality, nor how we would know this; and, what's worse, the problem itself is really a non-problem, since we can simply do entirely without talk in terms of truth and representation, and we will be just as able to solve the problems confronting us in daily life.
Much of the book is particularly focused on attacking the concept that the linguistic turn in philosophy has provided or can provide us with a better 'foundation for truth' than earlier attempts (Kant, Hegel, etc.). This is a highly abstract and technical discussion, where Rorty relies strongly on the counter-tradition of Quine, Sellars, and the late Wittgenstein. Thorough knowledge of all these writers and the issues in philosophy of language are required to understand this, though if you do, it is very rewarding.
Rorty subsequently goes on from his conclusions on the redundancy of the linguistic turn to found on this a general "pragmatist" approach to philosophy. Working with Davidson's concept that a majority of things we know cannot be false (since our concepts of true and false rely on context), as well as Dewey's dictum that whatever is not a problem in reality cannot be a problem in philosophy, he passionately and intelligently shows that we can do without ANY foundation for truth at all. Moreover, this also entails that the special position of philosophy as guardian of 'truth' or 'rationality' or the 'a priori synthetic' or other ways to formulate the "permitted ways of talking" disappears entirely, hopefully ending these philosophers' self-delusions so carefully constructed since Kant. Instead, Rorty proposes that we see philosophy as just another way of talking about problems we face in life, similar to and equal with poetry, literature, but also the social and physical sciences.
Indeed, one of the criticisms often made of Rorty is that he ignores the way in which the natural sciences 'work', and that this proves that it must in some way be 'in contact with reality'. Similarly, many people have felt threatened that if we do away with truth 'out there' and representation entirely, there will be no basis on which to decide what is true and what is not, and how we will separate the scientific from the every-day. Rorty is fortunately aware of these issues and counters them, stating that there is in fact no practical difference between saying that "science works because it's true" and "science is true because it works". The latter is just a more practical way of saying it, since truth is whatever we feel is warrantedly assertible at any time, given what we think works. Rorty therefore wants to do away with the special status of science as such as well, seeing no reason to see physical sciences as more "real" than social ones, nor sciences altogether as an a priori more "real" description of the world than any other (though it may of course well be a more practical way to talk about things for all sorts of purposes). This is especially interesting since a lot of people who feel called upon to defend the importance of Truth tend to view the physical sciences as paradigmatic, and this is also the case with the tradition of analytical philosophy, which tries to model philosophy after those sciences. Rorty himself started off as one of those, but halfway an already succesful academic career, he changed his mind entirely.
Overall, Rorty's attack on 'realism' of various kinds in philosophy of science as well as epistemology, metaphysics, and all a priori talk in general is as powerful as it is intelligent, and fans of the late Wittgenstein (like me) will feel that peculiar sensation of a suffocating cloud of ancient philosophical problems and dualisms being finally lifted, letting fresh air and sunlight in. Dissolving problems rather than solving them is Rorty's purpose, and he succeeds admirably.
The book is at a high level of abstraction, assumes thorough knowledge with at least 20th century philosophical writing as well as a reasonably strong knowledge of the history of philosophy, and is certainly not easy reading. Nevertheless, Rorty is in my view one of the most revolutionary philosophers of the 20th Century, together with Wittgenstein, and since this book is his primary formulation of his views, it is a must read.
Focus on the Family Resemblance February 20, 2007
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
Richard Rorty is not exactly an obscure figure; and although his time of maximum exposure is probably a decade past, "Rortian" ideas still inform much of the educated world's understanding of philosophy and its relation to other fields of inquiry and culture. *Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature* is interesting today, perhaps *in spite* of the Rorty fad, because it contains much which will surprise the person with a casual acquaintance with such tropes. This is not the work of a social-democratic Nowhere Man attempting to resurrect dead cultural and political standpoints, but someone with a lively understanding of *la conjoncture* in analytic philosophy: the book successfully and elegantly engages with analytic programs that were most contemporary at the time of its writing, and remain influential even today.
In this it notably builds on Rorty's period of "normal science", the essays in philosophy of mind he wrote during the '60s (which helped establish the position of "eliminative materialism"). Here Rorty reassesses this work in light of what has since come to seem like an inescapable revolution in analytic philosophy, the metaphysical conclusions derived from modal logic by Kripke and others. Rorty's treatment of Kripkeanism is one of the most exciting parts of the book, but there is some competition from his charitable and capable assessment of Fodor's philosophy of psychology and its consequences for our philosophical practice generally. Rorty is also a talented expositor of Donald Davidson, who figures as an ally in this book for pursuing a "pure" research program with fewer "metaphysical" consequences than the work of Putnam: Davidsonianism, like much else, receives a relatively effortless yet suitably careful treatment, making this a suitable work for someone who wants to learn more about the general layout of analytic philosophy.
Someone familiar with the book, or with thumbnail sketches of Rorty, might object to this assessment: surely the point of the book is its sweeping pragmatist metaphilosophy, vindicating "antifoundationalist" positions on everything from phenomenal consciousness to human rights. Well, as mentioned in the book much of this ground was already covered by others (Dewey's *The Quest For Certainty* is an especially notable precursor), and in my opinion the concluding argument that philosophy ought to move from technical work to an Oakeshottean "conversation" about what is important to us as a culture is somewhat of a comedown after the able and exciting argumentation of the rest of the book. This section presages much of the way Rorty would continue on, but there is really no reason at all to throw bad money after good; a suitable understanding of this fine book should relieve you of the need to "advance" to Rorty's tiresome cultural politics.
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