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

by Richard Rorty

All these are good questions, and nothing that I have said so far helps answer them. To answer them, I think, nothing will serve save the history of ideas. Just as the patient needs to relive his past to answer his questions, so philosophy needs to relive its past in order to answer its questions. So far I have, in the customary manner of contemporary philosophers of mind, been flinging around terms like “phenomenal,” “functional,” “intentional,” “spatial” and the like as if these formed the obvious vocabulary in which to discuss the topic. But of course the philosophers who created the language which gave us the mind-body problem did not use this vocabulary, or anything close to it. If we are to understand how we got the intuitions which make us think that there must be a real, indissoluble, philosophical problem somewhere in the neighborhood, we have to set aside our up-to-date jargon and think in the vocabulary of the philosophers whose books gave us those intuitions. In my Wittgensteinian view, an intuition is never anything more or less than familiarity with a language-game, so to discover the source of our intuitions is to relive the history of the philosophical language-game we find ourselves playing.

09-01-2020. 34. Is this not very similar to Nietzschean genealogy?