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

by Richard Rorty

There is no “normal” philosophical discourse which provides common commensurating ground for those who see science and edification as, respectively, “rational” and “irrational,” and those who see the quest for objectivity as one possibility among others to be taken account of in wirkungsgeschichtliche Bewusstsein. If there is no such common ground, all we can do is to show how the other side looks from our own point of view. That is, all we can do is be hermeneutic about the opposition—trying to show how the odd or paradoxical or offensive things they say hang together with the rest of what they want to say, and how what they say looks when put in our own alternative idiom. This sort of hermeneutics with polemical intent is common to Heidegger’s and Derrida’s attempts to deconstruct the tradition.

December 8, 2020. Page 300 and