Volume 28, Number 4 · March 19, 1981
The End of Philosophy?
By Quentin Skinner
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
by Richard Rorty
Princeton University Press,, 401 pp., $6.95 (paper)
Ever since Aristotle declared that philosophy is 'the first and last of the sciences,' philosophers have tended to take a very exalted view of the importance of their subject. They will find it much harder to do so after reading Professor Richard Rorty's disturbing and brilliantly argued book. He opens his attack on the traditional pretensions of philosophers by considering the reasons for their longstanding confidence. The explanation for this confidence is said to lie in their continuing acceptance of the seventeenth-century idea that a philosopher is someone who knows 'something about knowing which nobody else knows so well.' This image is in turn said to owe its plausibility to the work of Descartes, who introduced the key concept of the mind as a species of inner space, a consciousness in search of indubitable knowledge about the external world. He thereby suggested the central task of modern philosophy: the attempt to determine, by analyzing the concept of mind itself, what forms of knowledge are susceptible to being acquired with certainty.
Review, 3872 words
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