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Philosophy in America Today
| Article
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10589 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1986 |
8,327 Words |
| Author
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Richard Rorty
Richard M. Rorty is Kenan Professor of Humanities at the
University of Virginia. His books include Philosophy and the
Mirror of Nature, and Consequences of Pragmatism. Reprinted
by permission from the University of Minnesota Press. |
Analytic Philosophy and the Tradition
Revolutionary movements within an intellectual discipline require a revisionist theory of that discipline. Reichenbach performed this service for analytic philosophy in his Rise of Scientific Philosophy. That book, published in 1951, presents the view of history which explains Quine's quip that people go into philosophy for one of two reasons: some are interested in the history of philosophy, and some in philosophy. Quine's wisecrack assumes, and Reichenbach's book argues, that the proper concern of philosophy is to solve a set of identifiable problems, problems arising out of the activity and results of the natural sciences. Reichenbach describes his book as follows: "It maintains that philosophic speculation is a passing stage, occurring when philosophic problems are raised at a time which does not possess the logical means to solve them. It claims that there is, and always has been, a scientific approach to philosophy. And it wishes to show that from this ground has sprung a scientific philosophy which, in the science of our time, has found the tools to solve those problems that in earlier times have been the subject of guesswork only. To put it briefly: this book is written with the intention of showing that philosophy has proceeded from speculation to science."
Reichenbach's history could no longer be written in the terms in which he wrote it, since he took for granted all the positivist doctrines which, in the intervening thirty years, have been dismantled by Wittgenstein, Quine, Sellars, and Kuhn. But most post-positivistic analytic philosophers would still agree that philosophy has, in relatively recent times, "proceeded from speculation to science." They would accept the view that one can define philosophy in terms of a set of identifiable, enduring problems, which were dealt with in awkward and unsophisticated ways in earlier periods, and are now being dealt with in a precision and rigor hitherto unknown. There may be disagreement about which of these problems are to be solved and which dissolved or simply set aside. There may also be disagreement about whether, as Reichenbach thought, the tools are provided by science or whether, instead, they must be forged by the philosophers themselves. But these disagreements are minor compared to the broad agreement on the sort of historical story which is to be told.
Reichenbach's construction of a sweeping historical drama required him to be selective in his choice of incident. If one wants to interpret philosophy as an attempt to understand the nature of natural science, as flourishing when natural science has
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