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

by Richard Rorty

Looking backward we see Descartes and Hobbes as “beginning modern philosophy,” but they thought of their own cultural role in terms of what Lecky was to call “the warfare between science and theology.” They were fighting (albeit discreetly) to make the intellectual world safe for Copernicus and Galileo. They did not think of themselves as offering “philosophical systems,” but as contributing to the efflorescence of research in mathematics and mechanics, as well as liberating intellectual life from ecclesiastical institutions. Hobbes defined “philosophy” as “such knowledge of effects of appearances, as we acquire by true ratiocination from the knowledge we have first of their causes of generation.”1 He had no wish to distinguish what he was doing from something else called “science.” It was not until after Kant that our modern philosophy-science distinction took hold. Until the power of the churches over science and scholarship was broken, the energies of the men we now think of as “philosophers” were directed toward demarcating their activities from religion. It was only after that battle had been won that the question of separation from the sciences could arise.

October 24, 2020. Page 132. Yet philosophy of religion is so big!