In Praise of Therapeutic Philosophy and Against System Building

So effective was Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) for me when I first read it in 1981 (the 1980, second corrected edition) that long before I came to inhabit and be inhabited by James’s Pragmatism and later coming to identify myself as a pragmatist, I felt comfortable, safe, after moving through Rorty’s mirror, in setting aside the thornier problems troubling hundreds of years of thinking about thinking contained in the canonic texts I had studied as a student of philosophy. One could say that Rorty liberated me, primed me to become self-reliant, Emersonian. I reread Rorty’s volume during the summer of 1998 in West Cork, Ireland in the shadow of Mount Gabriel, and appropriately recalled its annunciation as I prepared readings for the graduate seminar I was to offer that fall in “American Aesthetics,” one in a series I give every year at The Graduate Center, CUNY exploring and cultivating the field whose yield includes A Natural History of Pragmatism and now – having gone through Rorty’s Mirror a third time – the chapters of this text.