The Creation of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1967–1979)

In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (PMN, 1979), Rorty argued that the idea that truth (as correspondence to reality) transcends historical paradigms is fundamental to philosophy as an autonomous discipline. But the idea lacks justification, and with this realisation, philosophy as an autonomous discipline comes to an end. In this essay, I trace the route by which Rorty arrived at this conclusion. It is apparent that already by 1974 Rorty had linked his criticisms of the spectatorial account of knowledge to the concept of a self-serving explanatory paradigm, and by the end of that year the first draft of PMN had been written. However, Rorty wished to offer something other than purely negative criticisms. It was only after he felt that he could answer the question of what we are to do once the spectatorial account of knowledge is laid aside that he at last felt ready to publish the book. The essay ends with a sideways look at another seminal philosophical publication, published in the same year as PMN, Richard Popkin’s The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza. Whereas Rorty argues that the urge to correspond is ‘the philosophical urge’, it might be inferred from Popkin’s work that the urge to doubt is even more fundamental.