ABSTRACT
Many have taken the real object of Richard Rorty's attack on systematic philosophy to be an attack on analytical philosophy. From a reading of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature it is very easy to get the impression that Rorty is telling us we should go from epistemology to hermeneutics, from systematic philosophy to edifying philosophy, giving us a new kind of philosophical theory. This alternative conception of Rorty's is not clearly or perhaps even consistently articulated. Dewey sees further and deeper than does Rorty or Wittgenstein, Bernstein argues, as to what a reconstructed philosophy would look like on the other side of a liberation from the Tradition and its eternal "problems of philosophy." Rorty is right in claiming that a variety of specific and diverse contextually embedded factors in the main determine how at any specific time it is reasonable to proceed.
