 He credited Rorty and Nozick with confronting philosophy's crisis with "careful reason, wit, and a humane concern for the fundamental questions", thereby showing that academic philosophy is still worth studying.He described both their works as "major books" that directly address the "doubt in which academic philosophy finds itself" due to charges that it is overly technical and ignores or misunderstands continental philosophy.Barker compared the book to "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" and MacIntyre's "After Virtue" (1981), and described it as "powerful", brilliant, and well-written.