Tom Sorell

Rorty maintains that idealism and realism are dead ends and that somewhere beyond them is a better philosophy--a special kind of pragmatism--without the pretensions or illusions of what it supersedes. Unfortunately, the view of philosophy that Rorty puts forward is neither independently attractive nor easy to understand as a wholesome middle way between idealism and realism. In some ways it is hard to recognise as a view of philosophy at all. I argue for something closer to Thomas Nagel's view of philosophy, and Nagel's realism.

In this study, Tom Sorell seeks to rehabilitate views that are often instantly dismissed in analytic philosophy. His book serves as a reinterpretation of Cartesianism and responds directly to the dislike of Descartes in contemporary philosophy. To identify what is defensible in Cartesianism, Sorell starts with a picture of unreconstructed Cartesianism, which is characterized as realistic, antisceptical but respectful of scepticism, rationalist, centered on the first person, dualist, and dubious of the comprehensiveness of natural science and its supposed independence of metaphysics. Bridging the gap between history of philosophy and analytic philosophy, Sorell also shows for the first time how some contemporary analytic philosophy is deeply Cartesian, despite its outward hostility to Cartesianism.