Preston Stovall

At the close of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature Richard Rorty lays out a contrast between what he calls 'systematic' and 'edifying' philosophical anthropologies. Whereas the systematic philosopher aims to speak for the ages, the edifying philosopher addresses herself to issues of her day, often by way of shattering conventional idols. Rorty sees these two approaches as mutually exclusive. The aim of this paper is to defend a conception of philosophy as both systematic and edifying in the relevant senses. I first respond to Rorty's argument that Wilfrid Sellars' account of picturing, as an isomorphic relation between the world and states of the central nervous system, involves an illicit 'mind as mirror' metaphor. I then lay out some of the philosophical anthropology that motivates Sellars' account of picturing, and I connect this anthropology to philosophical and scientific work undertaken in Europe and America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On this basis I argue that we are left with a (systematic) project handed down to us by earlier generations, and that in taking up this project we are in the (edifying) business of creating new ways of thinking about ourselves as part of the natural world.

This paper addresses a reading of Hegel's metaphysics made by Tom Rockmore in Hegel, Idealism, and Analytic Philosophy, and in doing so offers an alternative. Whereas Rockmore sees Hegel's project as metaphysically anti-realist, and so squarely at odds with most contemporary appropriations of his work, I argue that metaphysical realism is a commitment Hegel requires in order to overcome the Kantian reliance on an unknowable thing-in-itself. This metaphysically realist reading of Hegel clarifies some of the more puzzling sections of the Phenomenology of Spirit, and it offers insight into the structure of Hegel's philosophy writ large, particularly concerning the relationship between the Phenomenology's closing discussion of Absolute Knowing and Hegel's views on logic, the natural world, and society.