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

by Richard Rorty

On both sides of the Channel, however, most philosophers have remained Kantian. Even when they claim to have “gone beyond” epistemology, they have agreed that philosophy is a discipline which takes as its study the “formal” or “structural” aspects of our beliefs, and that by examining these the philosopher serves the cultural function of keeping the other disciplines honest, limiting their claims to what can be properly “grounded.” The great exceptions to this neo-Kantian consensus are, once again, Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger. In connection with the topic of this section—the notion of “foundations” of knowledge as based on an analogy with the compulsion to believe when staring at an object—it is Heidegger who is especially important. For Heidegger has tried to show how the epistemological notion of “objectivity” derives from, as he puts it, the Platonic “identification of ϕύσις with ἰδϵ́α”—of the reality of a thing with its presence before us.41 He is concerned to explore the way in which the West became obsessed with the notion of our primary relation to objects as analogous to visual perception, and thus to suggest that there could be other conceptions of our relations to things. The historical roots of the Aristotle-Locke analogy of knowledge to perception are beyond the scope of this book, but we can at least take from Heidegger the idea that the desire for an “epistemology” is simply the most recent product of the dialectical development of an originally chosen...

October 25, 2020. Page 163. Heidegger