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

by Richard Rorty

Ever since Descartes made methodological solipsism the mark of rigorous and professional philosophical thinking, philosophers have wanted to find the “ground” of cognition, morality, aesthetic taste, and anything else that matters within the individual. For how could there be anything in societies which individuals had not put there? Only since Hegel have philosophers begun toying with the notion that the individual apart from his society is just one more animal. The antidemocratic implications of this view, not to mention its historicist and relativist implications, have made it difficult for Hegelian modes of thought to have any impact on the hard core of analytic philosophy—epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. But Sellars’s “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”—self-described as “incipient Meditations Hegeliènnes”24—succeeds in prying raw feels and justified true belief apart and depriving raw feels of their status as privileged representations. It thereby shows how behaviorism in epistemology can avoid the confusion between explanation and justification which made empiricist epistemology seem possible and necessary. In chapters seven and eight I shall try to show how the emphasis on the priority of the public to the private which results from repudiating empiricism paves the way for further Hegelian and Heideggerian projects of deconstruction.

November 16, 2020. Page 192.