Robert Brandom

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Western Philosophy Contemporary philosophy
Name	Robert B. Brandom
Birth	March 13, 1950
School/tradition	Analytic
Main interests	Pragmatism Philosophy of language Philosophy of mind Philosophy of logic
Influenced by	Wilfrid Sellars · Michael Dummett Gottlob Frege · L. Wittgenstein Immanuel Kant · G.W.F. Hegel Richard Rorty
Influenced	Mark Lance

Robert Brandom (born 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. He earned his B.A. from Yale University and his Ph.D. from Princeton University, under Richard Rorty and David Kellogg Lewis. He is married to Barbara Brandom, a professor in the medical school at the University of Pittsburgh.

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 G. W. F. Hegel, Gottlob Frege, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

He is best-known for an ongoing project to recast philosophy of language in an inferentialist mode (see inferential role semantics) as an alternative to representationalist semantics. Roughly, the idea is to carry out the Wittgensteinian task of explaining meaning in terms of use. 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). 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.

[edit] Books

• 1.Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism

Oxford University Press, 2008, 240 pp. ISBN#0-199-54287-2

2. In the Space of Reasons: Selected Essays of Wilfrid Sellars

Edited with an Introduction by Kevin Scharp and Robert Brandom. Harvard University Press, 2007, 528 pp. ISBN#0-674-02498-2

3. Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality

Harvard University Press, 2002, 430 pp. ISBN#0-674-00903-7

4. Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism

Harvard University Press, 2000 (paperback 2001), 230 pp. ISBN#0-674-00158-3 (cloth), #0-674-00692-5 (paper)

5. Rorty and His Critics Edited, with an Introduction (includes "Vocabularies of Pragmatism") by Robert Brandom Original essays by: Rorty, Habermas, Davidson, Putnam, Dennett, McDowell, Bouveresse, Brandom, Williams, Allen, Bilgrami, Conant, and Ramberg. Blackwell's Publishers, Oxford, July 2000 ISBN#0-631-20981-6 (cloth), #0-631-20982-4 (paper)

6. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind

by Wilfrid Sellars Robert B. Brandom (ed.) Harvard University Press, 1997 With an Introduction by Richard Rorty and Study Guide by Robert Brandom ISBN#0-674-25154-7 (cloth) #0-674-25155-5 (paper)

7. Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment Harvard University Press (Cambridge) 1994. 741 pp. ISBN#0-674-54319-X 9 (cloth), #0-674-54330-0 (paper)

8. The Logic of Inconsistency with Nicholas Rescher Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1980, 174 pp.

[edit] External links

• Home Page
• 2005-2006 John Locke Lectures
• Interview 1999
• Presentation in Sydney 2005

Academic Genealogy
Notable teachers	Notable students
Richard Rorty, David Kellogg Lewis	Mark Lance