Abstract

inquiry that ultimately concerns the nature of knowing. The traditional name for it is epistemology. Dihhey wanted to pursue it without jumping beyond the historical reflection of historically situated inquirers to a static, trans-historical standpoint. Rorty apparently does not want to pursue it on any basis. Yet his position is born of extensive, and often insightful, historical interpretation, which seems to be more than a "way of coping" (or refusing to cope) with the history of modern philosophy, His interpretations make an implicit claim to knowledge, and thereby naturally reopen at least some of the questions they were intended to dispatch. I suggest that as long as historical reflection plays this sort of problematic role in the effort to pass beyond our intellectual history, we are neither beyond modernity nor beyond Dilthey. His thought will still be a living voice...