*Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature* is a book from inside analytic philosophy aimed at analytic philosophy's founding assumption. Rorty's claim is historical: the question "how is knowledge possible?" is not a fixed problem of the human mind but the product of a particular picture. Descartes established an inner realm reached by introspection, Locke filled that realm with accumulating impressions, and Kant seated the picture in the position of a tribunal grounding the other sciences. The mind became a mirror reflecting nature; philosophy's job became polishing the mirror — auditing the accuracy of representations.

Rorty draws the tools that make this picture untenable from philosophy itself: Sellars's critique of the Given removes the foundational storey of experience, and Quine's critique of analyticity removes a separate layer of linguistic truth. Together they leave no standpoint outside language and experience from which the "accuracy" of a representation could be measured. What remains is not a denial of truth but a denial of a neutral court to adjudicate it.

Rorty's proposal concerns what philosophy becomes once it vacates that position. In place of systematic, foundation-laying philosophy, an "edifying" philosophy that compares vocabularies and unsettles habits; not access to reality, but a conversation worth continuing. Part of the book's provocation is that it sets Dewey, the later Wittgenstein, and Heidegger — three names from three traditions — side by side as having arrived at the same conclusion.

The book opened a deep rift in analytic philosophy; Rorty soon left the Princeton philosophy department for a humanities chair at Virginia. Critics accused him of sliding into relativism; defenders said he had forced philosophy to see its own historical conditions. On either reading, 1979 is the date the analytic tradition turned to look at itself.