Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2022
There have been many responses to Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, but none of them have said why philosophers should be assigned a unique set of offices within the halls of academe rather than simply be distributed among the offices already provided for practicioners of the special disciplines (which, after the German Wissenschaften, will henceforth be referred to as the “sciences”)—with logicians situated among the mathematicians, epistemologlsts among the psychologists, and so forth. And ultimately the challenge of Rorty's book boils down to this bureaucratic question. We may not be convinced by his story of how philosophers, starting with Descartes and Locke, unwittingly came to raise the sciences of their day to the status of metaphysics. Nor may we find very illuminating his suggestion that philosophers now join the ranks of cultural critics.