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

by Richard Rorty

By the time Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature appeared, I was a colleague of Dick’s, across the way in McCosh Hall at Princeton, seeing him regularly and being shown the later essays that would go into his second book, Consequences of Pragmatism. He was a careful reader, and greatly wished to be read with care—a quality, with him, occasionally hidden under a love of paradox and a dandyish dryness of tone. His conscientiousness was deeper than his pride. I sent him once a chapter of a book which argued that Kant had lapsed into conventional metaphysics in the Critique of Judgment when he connected the possibility of aesthetic judgment with what he called a “supersensible substrate”—a peculiar formulation to come from a theorist who believed the aesthetic could exist only as an idea. “This has got to be wrong,” Dick said when we spoke in his office, and he took the quotation and the chapter downstairs to check against the German; five minutes later, he was back with a discovery. “You’re right. It’s not Kantian, and he shouldn’t say it, but he does.” The acknowledgment was characteristic and matter-of-fact. Over the years, as he changed his mind about some things, he made a fair number of public retractions, and there can have been few scholars of his stature who did it with such an absence of fuss. But the compulsion to notice what a philosopher “should have said” was an argumentative instinct he would never surrender and could not possibly regret. It showed to comical eff...

December 9, 2020. Page 426.