Region Western Philosophy Influenced Mark Lance Role Philosopher | Name Robert Brandom Notable ideas Inferentialism | |
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Main interests PragmatismPhilosophy of languagePhilosophy of mindPhilosophy of logic Books Making It Explicit, Articulating reasons, Between Saying and Doing: To, Tales of the Mighty Dead, Reason in Philosophy: Animatin Similar People |
Reason genealogy and the hermeneutics of magnanimity with robert brandom
Robert Boyce Brandom (born March 13, 1950) is an American philosopher who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. He works primarily in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and philosophical logic, and his work manifests both systematic and historical interests in these topics. His work has presented "arguably the first fully systematic and technically rigorous attempt to explain the meaning of linguistic items in terms of their socially norm-governed use ('meaning as use', to cite the Wittgensteinian slogan), thereby also giving a non-representationalist account of the intentionality of thought and the rationality of action as well."
Contents
- Reason genealogy and the hermeneutics of magnanimity with robert brandom
- From german idealism to american pragmatism and back prof robert brandom
- Education
- Philosophy
- Books
- References

Brandom is broadly considered to be part of the American pragmatist tradition in philosophy.

From german idealism to american pragmatism and back prof robert brandom
Education

Brandom earned his B.A. in 1972 from Yale University and his Ph.D. in 1977 from Princeton University, under Richard Rorty and David Kellogg Lewis. His doctoral thesis was titled Practice and Object.
Philosophy
Brandom's work is heavily influenced by that of Wilfrid Sellars, Richard Rorty, Michael Dummett and his Pittsburgh colleague John McDowell. He also draws heavily on the works of Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Gottlob Frege, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
He is best known for his investigations of linguistic meanings, or semantics. He advocates the view that the meaning of an expression is fixed by how it is used in inferences (see inferential role semantics). This project is developed at length in his influential 1994 book, Making It Explicit, and more briefly in Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (2000); a chapter of that latter work, Semantic Inferentialism and Logical Expressivism, outlines the main themes of representialism vs inferentialism and its relationship to logical expressivism.
Brandom has also published a collection of essays on the history of philosophy, Tales of the Mighty Dead (2002), a critical and historical sketch of what he calls the "philosophy of intentionality". He is the editor of a collection of papers about Richard Rorty's philosophy, Rorty and His Critics (2000). He delivered the 2006 John Locke lectures at Oxford University, and they have been published by Oxford University Press under the title Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism (2008). Brandom is currently working on a book dealing with Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.