Descartes's argument or cogito "I think, therefore I am". was that the idea of thought as reflecting or representing reality (of ‘mind as the mirror of nature’). However this was not the sublime necessity people took it to be, but only an unfortunate historical accident – a pointless verbal widget dreamed up by a lazy but ambitious French scientist called Descartes some time in the 1630s.
The only people to profit from Descartes’s concept of mind, according to Richard Rorty, were the philosophers. Just when God was threatening to abscond from the intellectual field and leave them with nothing to pontificate about, mentality offered itself to them as a pristine topic for endless new inquiries. It enabled philosophers to impose themselves on the rest of us as guardians of our mental mirror, as if we depended on them for maintaining its perfect polish and keeping the vandals of relativism at bay. Mentalistic philosophy was a conspiracy against the people, and the linguistic turn * had proved to be its latest twist
The linguistic turn was a major development in Western philosophy during the early 20th century, the most important characteristic of which is the focusing of philosophy and the other humanities primarily on the relationship between philosophy and language.
Philosophers should stop sulking over transcendental necessities: they should loosen up, try to get out a bit more and raise themselves fro their tenured armchairs and stop of endeavouring to keep knowledge pure by shoring up the walls of Cartesianism,
The only people to profit from Descartes’s concept of mind, according to Richard Rorty, were the philosophers. Just when God was threatening to abscond from the intellectual field and leave them with nothing to pontificate about, mentality offered itself to them as a pristine topic for endless new inquiries. It enabled philosophers to impose themselves on the rest of us as guardians of our mental mirror, as if we depended on them for maintaining its perfect polish and keeping the vandals of relativism at bay. Mentalistic philosophy was a conspiracy against the people, and the linguistic turn * had proved to be its latest twist
Philosophers should stop sulking over transcendental necessities: they should loosen up, try to get out a bit more and raise themselves fro their tenured armchairs and stop of endeavouring to keep knowledge pure by shoring up the walls of Cartesianism,
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