Robert Brandom

Infobox Philosopher

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region = Western Philosophy
era = Contemporary philosophy
color = #B0C4DE
|image_caption =
name = Robert B. Brandom
birth = March 13, 1950
school_tradition = Analytic
main_interests = Pragmatism Philosophy of language Philosophy of mind Philosophy of logic
notable_ideas =
influences = 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.

Books

*"Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism", Oxford University Press, 2008, 240 pp. ISBN#0-199-54287-2
*"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
*"Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality", Harvard University Press, 2002, 430 pp. ISBN#0-674-00903-7
*"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)
*"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)
*"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)
*"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)
*"The Logic of Inconsistency", with Nicholas Rescher. Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1980, 174 pp.

Books on Robert Brandom

* Bernd Prien and David P. Schweikard (eds.), "Robert Brandom: Analytic Pragmatist", Ontos, 2008, 194pp., ISBN 9783938793770. [Collection of essays with Brandom’s responses] .
* Jeremy Wanderer, "Robert Brandom", Acumen Publishing (UK); McGill-Queens University Press (US), 2008, 256 pp. 256 ISBN 184465088X ISBN-13: 9781844650880. [Critical introduction] .

External links

* [http://www.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/ Home Page]
* [http://www.pitt.edu/~brandom/locke.html 2005-2006 John Locke Lectures]
* [http://www.dif.unige.it/epi/hp/penco/pub/brandom_inter.pdf Interview 1999]
* [http://www.usyd.edu.au/time/conferences/Brandom-2005-parts/Brandom.mp3 Presentation in Sydney 2005]

academia
teachers=Richard Rorty, David Kellogg Lewis
students=Mark Lance