Reception of the Cartesian Dualism in Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

The paper deals with the question of legitimacy of Rorty's reference to "Descartes" and "Cartesian philosophy" as a turning point in the "philosophy-as-epistemology" tradition. The first chapter discusses Rorty's methodological presuppositions relevant to "therapeutic" and "historicistic" aspects of his "radical critics". It reveals that his notion of philosophical vocabulary as "metaphoric" is incoherent and confronts with his claim that there is "Cartesian-Kantian" in the Western philosophy. In the second chapter, it is concluded that Wittgensteinian "sense in usage" conception, which is relevant to Rorty, conflicts with his attempt to argue for the contingency of Cartesian terminology on the basis of the "criteria of the mental" argument.