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

by Richard Rorty

Not only the educated laypeople, but also their fellow academics, are usually utterly in the dark as to what philosophers do with their time. A geneticist can, if he takes the trouble, visualize roughly what his colleagues in economics or French literature are trying to do, and what means they employ to do it. They, with a bit more trouble, can do the same for him. But all of them find it much more difficult to do this for their friends in the philosophy department. Such phrases as “a spectator of all time and all eternity” and “the investigation of the being qua being” are appropriate to august and long-dead figures like Plato and Kant, but it’s hard to associate them with young Professor Dimble, who, desperately bucking for tenure, keeps promising to finish his book (entitled “Structure, Interpretation, and Choice: A Linguistic Approach to Value”). Dimble, it appears, is interested in language and in ethics. But when asked to resolve concrete moral dilemmas, he is embarrassed and annoyed. When asked questions about linguistics (in the sense of comparative grammar, phonematic analysis, and the like), he is blankly ignorant. When asked what his research for the book consists in, it turns out that he simply reads other philosophers and makes notes about their mistakes. When asked whether what he’s doing has any relation to what Plato and Kant did, he assures you that it does indeed—adding that, although of course Plato was thoroughly muddled about ethical choice, Kant did g...

December 8, 2020. Page 397.