Richard Rorty argues that modern philosophy has been dominated by a misleading image of the mind as a “mirror of nature,” whose task is to represent reality accurately and provide foundations for knowledge. His central claim is that philosophy should abandon the Cartesian, Lockean, and Kantian search for certainty, representation, and epistemological grounding. Rorty traces how the idea of “the mind” as an inner space containing representations emerged historically rather than eternally, and how philosophy came to imagine itself as a tribunal judging science, morality, art, and religion. Against this tradition, he draws on Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Dewey, Sellars, Quine, Davidson, and Kuhn to challenge the assumption that knowledge requires foundations or privileged access to reality. Instead of treating truth as correspondence between inner representations and an external world, Rorty proposes a pragmatist view in which knowledge is tied to justification, social practice, conversation, and coping with the world. His contrast between epistemology and hermeneutics is crucial: philosophy should not police culture from above, but participate in open-ended interpretation and edifying conversation. The conclusion is that philosophy must give up the fantasy of neutral foundations and become a practice of cultural redescription, freeing thought from inherited vocabularies rather than polishing the mirror of nature.
URBANISM MEETS ART