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

by Richard Rorty

The difference between the “mainstream” Anglo-Saxon tradition and the “mainstream” German tradition in twentieth-century philosophy is the expression of two opposed stances toward Kant. The tradition which goes back to Russell dismissed Kant’s problem about synthetic a priori truths as a misunderstanding of the nature of mathematics, and thus viewed epistemology as essentially a matter of updating Locke. In the course of this updating, epistemology was separated off from psychology by being viewed as a study of the evidential relations between basic and nonbasic propositions, and these relations were viewed as a matter of “logic” rather than of empirical fact. In the German tradition, on the other hand, the defense of freedom and spirituality through the notion of “constitution” was retained as the distinctive mission of the philosopher. Logical empiricism and, later, analytic philosophy were dismissed by most German (and many French) philosophers as not “transcendental,” and therefore neither methodologically sound nor properly edifying. Even those with the gravest doubts about most Kantian doctrines never doubted that something like his “transcendental turn” was essential. On the Anglo-Saxon side, the so-called linguistic turn was thought to do the job of demarcating philosophy from science, while freeing one of any vestiges of, or temptation to, “idealism” (which was thought the besetting sin of philosophy on the Continent).

October 25, 2020. Page 162. Continental philosophy verses analytic philosophy.