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the post-Kantian idealists, Hegel in particular, took to large-scale,
speculative construction; and those who reacted against Hegel–
Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche-did not do so as epistemologists.
But academic philosophers in Germany joyfully heeded the cry,
back to Kant, in 1865. Meanwhile, in the English-speaking world
the attitude of Locke persisted, apart from the brief, late, exotic
eruption of Hegelianism in the last quarter of the century. Bertrand
Russell and G. E. Moore started to get that under control in 1903.
The chief twentieth-century version of epistemology has been
analytic philosophy, dominant so far in various modulations, in the
English-speaking world and a few outposts like Poland and Sweden.
Stronger stuff, indeed, soon flooded the continental European
market. Although Edmund Husserl, in the first decades of the cen–
tury, seemed to be in much the old line of business, his technique of
phenomenology, despite his severely cognitive intentions, was soon
put to more romantic, emotional uses by Martin Heidegger and
Jean-Paul Sartre . In the last two, more or less structuralist decades,
Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida have detonated a pyrotechni–
cally colorful and startling assault on the whole, orderly, respect–
able, academic tradition in philosophy from Descartes to the neo–
Kantians and beyond in both directions.
Until recently, this intellectual insurrection has manifested
itself in the English-speaking world largely in literary criticism and
in antipositivist social thinking. As far as philosophy is concerned ,
there have been some moderately puzzled reports of what has been
going on but no large and intelligible endorsement until the publica–
tion of Rorty's
Philosophy and the Mirror
oj
Nature.
This is the en–
thusiastic profession of faith of a convert, fully acquainted with the
preoccupations of the type of philosopher he used to be . More
recently he brought out a collection of essays published between
1972 and 1980,
Consequences
oj
Pragmatism,
in which his main theme is
further explored, largely through his discovery of material from a
miscellaneous array of thinkers contributory to his theme.
He puts forward two main theses. One is that traditional
judicial epistemology should be abandoned and replaced by an alto–
gether less authoritarian, "conversational" style of philosophy. Its
practitioners would not be detached critics of the intellectual scene,
exulting in a special method of inquiry and in the special authority
over other disciplines with which it ennobles them. They would be
distinguished only in degree from other reflective people, by the
generality of their interests. They would no longer referee the games
