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

by Richard Rorty

What I have been saying is no more than a corollary of my thesis that, because philosophy’s product is dialogue, there is no extraphilosophical standpoint from which judgment may be passed upon it. This thesis can be seen as simply a way of encapsulating the point of the miniature dialogues that we set out above—the point that one can’t say anything about philosophy without being a philosopher oneself. But the suspicious neatness of this comeback, and the flavor of trickery in the dialogues that incarnate it, suggest that the real question is still being evaded. The real question, perhaps, is “O.K., so what do I have to do to count as a ‘philosopher’?” In other words, just how much about the history of philosophy does one have to know before one is entitled to decide either that (a) the philosophers should be doing something different, or that (b) one doesn’t have to know any more? Now the general answer to this is: lots. The specific answer is: enough to be able to offer answers to the questions that the philosophers of one’s day are asking. One ceases to be an amateur in philosophy when, and only when, one stops asking philosophers to speak one’s own language and starts telling them in their language why they should cease to speak that language. To put it another way, one ceases to be an amateur in philosophy when one stops saying that certain questions are pointless, and begins explaining not only why different questions should be asked, but why answers to these new one...

December 9, 2020. Page 415.