Epistemology

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

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Richard Rorty

1979

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is Rorty's landmark critique of the foundationalist tradition in Western philosophy — the idea that the mind is a mirror that accurately represents an independently existing reality, and that philosophy's task is to clarify and police this representational relationship. Rorty argues that this picture, which he traces from Descartes through Locke to Kant and beyond, has held philosophy captive for three centuries and generated a series of pseudo-problems that dissolve once we abandon the mirror metaphor. Drawing on Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey, Rorty argues that knowledge is not a matter of accurate representation but of social practices of justification and inquiry — what we can say to each other and defend in conversation. The book does not merely criticise analytic philosophy from within but calls for a wholesale reorientation of the enterprise toward "edifying" rather than "systematic" philosophy: philosophy as a continuing conversation rather than a discipline with foundations to secure.