RORTY (Richard).
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.
Rorty’s most important and influential book, a turning point in analytic philosophy and the single greatest influence on the revival of American pragmatism. An unusually difficult book to find in acceptable condition.
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature consists of an attempt to untangle the problem of what Rorty describes as ‘philosophy-as-epistemology’, with its seventeenth-century origins in Descartes, in which knowledge is presented as accurate representation, a conception rooted in the metaphor of mind as the mirror of nature. Rorty’s central claim is that we must abandon this representationalist epistemology in favour of a radical pragmatism, a move reminiscent of the Wittgensteinian doctrine of “dissolving” rather than solving philosophical problems.
