THE MODERN ORIGINS OF EPISTEMOLOGY

Rorty's critique of epistemology is based on his reading, primarily developed in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, of the history of modern philosophy. This reading begins with a sharp contrast between the ancient and the modern status of philosophy. For the ancients, philosophy was “queen of the sciences,” first, crowning and synthesizing the special sciences and, second, providing a basis for the good human life. These two functions were closely connected because knowledge of nature – particularly of human nature – was regarded as the ground for knowledge of the good; our vision of the world and of our place in it was the basis for our knowledge of how to live. The modern period replaced the ancient sciences (e.g., Aristotelian physics and biology), of which philosophy had been the culmination and queen, with the new modern sciences of Galileo, Newton, Dalton, and (eventually) Darwin.

The triumph of these new sciences was quickly seen by many intellectuals – Hobbes and Descartes, for example – as the destruction of the ancient system of philosophy, which by their day had become the philosophy of the schools. They believed that the new science, interpreted realistically, undermined the metaphysical heart of scholastic philosophy. The new scientific world was one merely of inert matter and mechanistic forces, a world of, to use the old terminology, material and efficient but no formal or final causes. Then as now, this new view was most plausible for the external material world.