“Unless we are willing to revive Platonic and Aristotelian notions about grasping universals, we shall not think that knowledge of general truths is made possible by some special, metaphysically distinctive, ingredient in human beings. Unless we wish to revive the seventeenth century’s somewhat awkward and inconsistent use of the Aristotelian notion of “substance” we shall not make sense of the notion of two ontological realms — the mental and the physical. Unless we wish to affirm […] the claim that a distinctive metaphysical property of “presence to consciousness” grounds some of our noninferential reports of our states — we shall not be able to use the notion of “entities whose appearance exhausts their reality” to bolster the mental-physical distinction.”

– Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature