4 - Contingency

Summary

Almost as soon as I began to study philosophy, I was impressed by the way in which philosophical problems appeared, disappeared, or changed shape, as the result of new assumptions or vocabularies.

(PMN: xiii)

Past the single vision

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature established Rorty as a significant, if very controversial, thinker, more highly regarded outside philosophy, perhaps, than within, though not necessarily of less overall intellectual importance on that count. The book's evident “success among nonphilosophers” boosted Rorty's confidence, but he was still troubled by the ghost that had haunted his youth: his inability to find a way of “holding reality and justice in a single vision” (WO: 12):

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature did not do much for my adolescent ambitions. The topics it treated – the mind-body problem, controversies in the philosophy of language about truth and meaning, Kuhnian philosophy of science – were pretty remote from both Trotsky and the orchids. I had gotten back on good terms with Dewey; I had articulated my historicist anti-Platonism; I had finally figured out what I thought about the direction and value of current movements in analytic philosophy; I had sorted out most of the philosophers I had read. But I had not spoken to any of the questions which got me started reading philosophers in the first place. I was no closer to the single vision which 30 years back I had gone to college to get.

(WO: 12)