[...]... something humanoid leaves the body at death and goes off on its own 7 Parallelness 6 Dewey sees the metaphor of the Eye of the Mind as the result of the prior notion that knowledge must be of the unchangeable: The theory of knowing is modeled after what was supposed to take place in the act of vision The object refracts light and is seen; it makes a difference to the eye and to the person having an optical... moral responsibilities Both assumptions are, however, often made Understanding why they are made requires an understanding of intellectual history rather than an understanding of the meanings of the relevant terms, or an analysis of the concepts they signify By sketching a little of the history of discussions of the mind, I hope to show that the problem of reason cannot be stated without a return to epistemological... suggestions about why the search for such a theory is misguided The book, like the writings of the philosophers I most admire, is therapeutic rather than constructive The therapy offered is, nevertheless, parasitic upon the constructive efforts of the very analytic philosophers whose frame of reference I am trying to put in question Thus most of the particular criticisms of the tradition which I offer are borrowed... generally On the relation of these two notions to valis in the pre-philosophical period, see Snell, chap I, where Plato's description of valis as "the eye of the soul" is cited and explained by reference to the archaic use of VOEiv as the grasp of images For our purposes, the important thing is that it is only when the notion of an immaterial and invisible object of knOWledge (as in the knowing of the geometer)... many men and angels as there happened to be Aristotle vacillated between the first and second options, with the second having the usual attrac22 See Royce's description of Cartesian subjectivism as "The Rediscovery of the Inner Life" (the title of chapter III of his The Spirit of Modern Philosophy [New York, 1892]) and as opening the way to an understanding that the real world must be "mental" (the conclusion... of culture was being made possIble by the success of natural science But by the early twentieth century the scientists had become as remote from most intellectuals as had the theologians Poets and novelIsts had taken the place of both preachers and philosophers as the moral teachers of the youth The result was that the more "scientific" and "rigorous" philosophy became, the less it had to do with the. .. is both mirror and eye in one The retinal image is itself the model for the "intellect which becomes all things," whereas in the Cartesian model, the intellect inspects entities modeled on retinal images The substantial forms of frogness and starness get right into the Aristotelian intellect, and are there in just the same way they are in the frogs and the stars-not in the way in which frogs and stars... prior to the conclusion of inquiry-a set of presuppositions discoverable a prioriwhich links contemporary philosophy to the Descartes- 8 INTRODUCTION Locke-Kant tradition For the notion that there is such a framework only makes sense if we think of this framework as imposed by the nature of the knowing subject, by the nature of his faculties or by the nature of the medium within which he works The very... a list of his mistakes and confusions but rather an understanding of how he came to make these mistakes and become involved in these confusions If we are going to get rid of the mind-body problem we need to be able to answer such questions as the following: How did these rather dusty little questions about the possible identity of pains and neurons ever get mixed up with the question of whether man... not the possession of accurate representations of an object but rather the subject's becoming identical with the object To see the difference between this argument and the various Cartesian and contemporary arguments for dualism, we need to see how very different these two epistemologies are Both lend themselves to the imagery of the Mirror of Nature But in Aristotle's conception intellect is not a mirror . alt="" Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature RICHARD RORTY Princeton University Press Princeton, New Jersey Copyright © 1979 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey All. we think of this framework as imposed by the nature of the knowing subject, by the nature of his faculties or by the nature of the medium with- in which he works. The very idea of " ;philosophy& quot; as. art, or religion. It purports to do this on the basis of its special understanding of the nature of knowledge and of mind. Philosophy can be foundational in respect to the rest of culture because culture is the as- semblage of claims