 Hacking believed that, like the philosopher Richard Rorty's "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature", "Philosophical Explanations" had the potential to bring renewed public attention to philosophy in the United States.He believed that the book would also impress philosophy professors.He compared the difficulty of reading it to that of reading the "Critique of Pure Reason", writing that in both works there was "apparent indifference to the reader"; he also considered Nozick's philosophical approach in some ways similar to Kant's.