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

by Richard Rorty

The notion that there is a problem about mind and body originated in the seventeenth century’s attempt to make “the mind” a self-contained sphere of inquiry. The idea was to offer a para-mechanical account of mental processes which, somehow, would underwrite some claims to knowledge and disallow other claims. The paradigm of the “epistemological turn” taken by philosophy in the seventeenth century was what Kant called “the physiology of the human understanding of the celebrated Mr. Locke”—a causal account of mental processes which is supposed to criticize and justify knowledge-claims. To get this notion off the ground required the Cartesian replacement of the ancient and medieval problem of reason by the modern problem of consciousness. If what I have been saying in the past two chapters is right, the persistence of notions like the “mind-body problem” and “the philosophy of mind” is due to the persistence of the notion that there is some link between the older notions of reason or personhood and the Cartesian notion of consciousness. Part II of this book attempts to dissolve the modern version of the problem of reason—the notion that there is a problem about the possibility or extent of accurate representation which is the concern of a discipline called “epistemology.” Insofar as it succeeds, this attempt frees us from the notion of human knowledge as an assemblage of representations in a Mirror of Nature, and thus reinforces the claim of part I that we can do without the...

September 19, 2020. Page 127.