Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: Thirtieth-Anniversary Edition (Princeton Classics)

by Richard Rorty

Kant put philosophy “on the secure path of a science” by putting outer space inside inner space (the space of the constituting activity of the transcendental ego) and then claiming Cartesian certainty about the inner for the laws of what had previously been thought to be outer. He thus reconciled the Cartesian claim that we can have certainty only about our ideas with the fact that we already had certainty—a priori knowledge—about what seemed not to be ideas. The Copernican revolution was based on the notion that we can only know about objects a priori if we “constitute” them, and Kant was never troubled by the question of how we could have apodictic knowledge of these “constituting activities,” for Cartesian privileged access was supposed to take care of that.12 Once Kant replaced the “physiology of the human understanding of the celebrated Mr. Locke” with (in Strawson’s words) “the mythical subject of transcendental psychology,” “epistemology” as a discipline came of age.

October 24, 2020. Page 138.