Download or read book From Empiricism to Expressivism written by Robert B. Brandom and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-06 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars ranks as one of the leading twentieth-century critics of empiricism—a philosophical approach to knowledge that seeks to ground it in human sense experience. Sellars stood in the forefront of a recoil within analytic philosophy from the foundationalist assumptions of contemporary empiricists. From Empiricism to Expressivism is a far-reaching reinterpretation of Sellars from one of the philosopher’s most brilliant intellectual heirs. Unifying and extending Sellars’s most important ideas, Robert Brandom constructs a theory of pragmatic expressivism which, in contrast to empiricism, understands meaning and knowledge in terms of the role expressions play in social practices. The key lies in Sellars’s radical reworking of Kant’s idea of the categories: the idea that the expressive job characteristic of many of the most important philosophical concepts is not to describe or explain the empirical world but rather to make explicit essential features of the conceptual framework that makes description and explanation possible. Brandom reconciles otherwise disparate elements of Sellars’s system, revealing a greater level of coherence and consistency in the philosopher’s arguments against empiricism than has usually been acknowledged. From Empiricism to Expressivism clarifies what Sellars had in mind when he talked about moving analytic philosophy from its Humean to its Kantian phase, and why such a move might be of crucial importance today.

Download or read book Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind written by Wilfrid Sellars and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1997-03-25 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most important work by one of America's greatest twentieth-century philosophers, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind is both the epitome of Wilfrid Sellars' entire philosophical system and a key document in the history of philosophy. First published in essay form in 1956, it helped bring about a sea change in analytic philosophy. It broke the link, which had bound Russell and Ayer to Locke and Hume--the doctrine of "knowledge by acquaintance." Sellars' attack on the Myth of the Given in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind was a decisive move in turning analytic philosophy away from the foundationalist motives of the logical empiricists and raised doubts about the very idea of "epistemology." With an introduction by Richard Rorty to situate the work within the history of recent philosophy, and with a study guide by Robert Brandom, this publication of Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind makes a difficult but indisputably significant figure in the development of analytic philosophy clear and comprehensible to anyone who would understand that philosophy or its history.

Download or read book Reason in Philosophy written by Robert Brandom and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An emphasis on our capacity to reason, rather than merely to represent, has been growing in philosophy over the years. This book gives an overview of the author's understanding of the role of reason as the structure at once of our minds and our meanings - what constitutes us as free, responsible agents.

Download or read book Making it Explicit written by Robert Brandom and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 772 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Where accounts of the relation between language and mind often rest on the concept of representation, Brandom sets out an approach based on inference, and on a conception of certain kinds of implicit assessment that become explicit in language. It is the first attempt to work out a detailed theory rendering linguistic meaning in terms of use.

Download or read book Tales of the Mighty Dead written by Robert Brandom and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A work in the history of systematic philosophy that is itself animated by a systematic philosophic aspiration, this book by one of the most prominent American philosophers working today provides an entirely new way of looking at the development of Western philosophy from Descartes to the present. Brandom begins by setting out a historical context and outlining a methodological rationale for his enterprise. Then, in chapters on Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel, Frege, Heidegger, and Sellars, he pursues the most fundamental philosophical issues concerning intentionality, and therefore mindedness itself, revealing an otherwise invisible set of overlapping themes and explanatory strategies. Variously functionalist, inferentialist, holist, normative, and social pragmatist in character, the explanations of intentionality offered by these philosophers, taken together, form a distinctive tradition. The fresh perspective afforded by this tradition enriches our understanding of the philosophical topics being addressed, provides a new conceptual vantage point for viewing our philosophical ancestors, and highlights central features of the sort of rationality that consists in discerning a philosophical tradition--and it does so by elaborating a novel, concrete instance of just such an enterprise.

Download or read book Articulating Reasons written by Robert BRANDOM and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert B. Brandom is one of the most original philosophers of our day, whose book Making It Explicit covered and extended a vast range of topics in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language--the very core of analytic philosophy. This new work provides an approachable introduction to the complex system that Making It Explicit mapped out. A tour of the earlier book's large ideas and relevant details, Articulating Reasons offers an easy entry into two of the main themes of Brandom's work: the idea that the semantic content of a sentence is determined by the norms governing inferences to and from it, and the idea that the distinctive function of logical vocabulary is to let us make our tacit inferential commitments explicit. Brandom's work, making the move from representationalism to inferentialism, constitutes a near-Copernican shift in the philosophy of language--and the most important single development in the field in recent decades. Articulating Reasons puts this accomplishment within reach of nonphilosophers who want to understand the state of the foundations of semantics. Table of Contents: Introduction 1. Semantic Inferentialism and Logical Expressivism 2. Action, Norms, and Practical Reasoning 3. Insights and Blindspots of Reliabilism 4. What Are Singular Terms, and Why Are There Any? 5. A Social Route from Reasoning to Representing 6. Objectivity and the Normative Fine Structure of Rationality Notes Index Displaying a sovereign command of the intricate discussion in the analytic philosophy of language, Brandom manages successfully to carry out a program within the philosophy of language that has already been sketched by others, without losing sight of the vision inspiring the enterprise in the important details of his investigation ' Using the tools of a complex theory of language, Brandom succeeds in describing convincingly the practices in which the reason and autonomy of subjects capable of speech and action are expressed. --J'rgen Habermas

Download or read book In the Space of Reasons written by Wilfrid Sellars and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sellars (1912-1989) was, in the opinion of many, the most important American philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century. This collection, coedited by Sellars's chief interpreter and intellectual heir, should do much to elucidate and clearly establish the significance of this difficult thinker's vision for contemporary philosophy.

Download or read book A Spirit of Trust written by Robert B. Brandom and published by Belknap Press. This book was released on 2019-05-01 with total page 857 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Forty years in the making, this long-awaited reinterpretation of Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit is a landmark contribution to philosophy by one of the world’s best-known and most influential philosophers. In this much-anticipated work, Robert Brandom presents a completely new retelling of the romantic rationalist adventure of ideas that is Hegel’s classic The Phenomenology of Spirit. Connecting analytic, continental, and historical traditions, Brandom shows how dominant modes of thought in contemporary philosophy are challenged by Hegel. A Spirit of Trust is about the massive historical shift in the life of humankind that constitutes the advent of modernity. In his Critiques, Kant talks about the distinction between what things are in themselves and how they appear to us; Hegel sees Kant’s distinction as making explicit what separates the ancient and modern worlds. In the ancient world, normative statuses—judgments of what ought to be—were taken to state objective facts. In the modern world, these judgments are taken to be determined by attitudes—subjective stances. Hegel supports a view combining both of those approaches, which Brandom calls “objective idealism”: there is an objective reality, but we cannot make sense of it without first making sense of how we think about it. According to Hegel’s approach, we become agents only when taken as such by other agents. This means that normative statuses such as commitment, responsibility, and authority are instituted by social practices of reciprocal recognition. Brandom argues that when our self-conscious recognitive attitudes take the radical form of magnanimity and trust that Hegel describes, we can overcome a troubled modernity and enter a new age of spirit.

Download or read book Between Saying and Doing written by Robert Brandom and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-04-24 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between Saying and Doing aims to reconcile pragmatism with analytic philosophy. Robert Brandom investigates the relations between the meaning of linguistic expressions (logical, indexical, modal, normative, and intentional, among others) and their use. He offers new ways of thinking about empiricism, naturalism, and functionalism.

Download or read book Sellars and Contemporary Philosophy written by David Pereplyotchik and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-12-08 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wilfrid Sellars made profound and lasting contributions to nearly every area of philosophy. The aim of this collection is to highlight the continuing importance of Sellars’ work to contemporary debates. The contributors include several luminaries in Sellars scholarship, as well as members of the new generation whose work demonstrates the lasting power of Sellars’ ideas. Papers by O’Shea and Koons develop Sellars’ underexplored views concerning ethics, practical reasoning, and free will, with an emphasis on his longstanding engagement with Kant. Sachs, Hicks and Pereplyotchik relate Sellars’ views of mental phenomena to current topics in cognitive science and philosophy of mind. Fink, deVries, Price, Macbeth, Christias, and Brandom grapple with traditional Sellarsian themes, including meaning, truth, existence, and objectivity. Brandhoff provides an original account of the evolution of Sellars’ philosophy of language and his project of "pure pragmatics". The volume concludes with an author-meets-critics section centered around Robert Brandom’s recent book, From Empiricism to Expressivism: Brandom Reads Sellars, with original commentaries and replies.

Download or read book The Deed is Everything written by Aaron Ridley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-21 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nietzsche is often held to be an extreme sceptic about human agency, keen to debunk it along every dimension. He dismisses the ideas of freedom, autonomy and morality, we are told, and even the very existence of agents or selves. This book sets out the opposite view. Ridley argues that Nietzsche is committed to an 'expressivist' conception of agency, a conception that allows him to develop highly distinctive accounts not only of freedom, autonomy and morality, but also of selfhood. In the course of the argument, the text revisits a variety of central Nietzschean themes including self-creation, the sovereign individual, will to power, Kantian and Christian morality, and amor fati often to unexpected effect. The Nietzsche who emerges from this book has a clear, if demanding, conception of human agency and a robust commitment to the value of human excellence in all of its forms. This comprehensive study of Nietzsche and the expressivist conception of agency is important reading for all Nietzsche scholars and philosophers of action, but is also of more general interest to academics and students in philosophy.

Download or read book From Rules to Meanings written by Ondřej Beran and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-01-31 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inferentialism is a philosophical approach premised on the claim that an item of language (or thought) acquires meaning (or content) in virtue of being embedded in an intricate set of social practices normatively governed by inferential rules. Inferentialism found its paradigmatic formulation in Robert Brandom’s landmark book Making it Explicit, and over the last two decades it has established itself as one of the leading research programs in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of logic. While Brandom’s version of inferentialism has received wide attention in the philosophical literature, thinkers friendly to inferentialism have proposed and developed new lines of inquiry that merit wider recognition and critical appraisal. From Rules to Meaning brings together new essays that systematically develop, compare, assess and critically react to some of the most pertinent recent trends in inferentialism. The book’s four thematic sections seek to apply inferentialism to a number of core issues, including the nature of meaning and content, reconstructing semantics, rule-oriented models and explanations of social practices and inferentialism’s historical influence and dialogue with other philosophical traditions. With contributions from a number of distinguished philosophers—including Robert Brandom and Jaroslav Peregrin—this volume is a major contribution to the philosophical literature on the foundations of logic and language.

Download or read book Pragmatism as Anti Authoritarianism written by Richard Rorty and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-17 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The last book by the eminent American philosopher and public intellectual Richard Rorty, providing the definitive statement of his mature philosophical and political views. Richard RortyÕs Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism is a last statement by one of AmericaÕs foremost philosophers. Here Rorty offers his culminating thoughts on the influential version of pragmatism he began to articulate decades ago in his groundbreaking Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Marking a new stage in the evolution of his thought, RortyÕs final masterwork identifies anti-authoritarianism as the principal impulse and virtue of pragmatism. Anti-authoritarianism, on this view, means acknowledging that our cultural inheritance is always open to revision because no authority exists to ascertain the truth, once and for all. If we cannot rely on the unshakable certainties of God or nature, then all we have left to go onÑand argue withÑare the opinions and ideas of our fellow humans. The test of these ideas, Rorty suggests, is relatively simple: Do they work? Do they produce the peace, freedom, and happiness we desire? To achieve this enlightened pragmatism is not easy, though. Pragmatism demands trust. Pragmatism demands that we think and care about what others think and care about, which further requires that we account for othersÕ doubts of and objections to our own beliefs. After all, our own beliefs are as contestable as anyone elseÕs. A supple mind who draws on theorists from John Stuart Mill to Annette Baier, Rorty nonetheless is always an apostle of the concrete. No book offers a more accessible account of RortyÕs utopia of pragmatism, just as no philosopher has more eloquently challenged the hidebound traditions arrayed against the goals of social justice.

Download or read book Wilfrid Sellars Idealism and Realism written by Patrick Reider and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-11-17 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wilfrid Sellars, Idealism, and Realism is the first study of its kind to address a range of realist and idealist views inspired by psychological nominalism. Bringing together premier analytic realists and distinguished defenders of German idealism, it reveals why psychological nominalism is one of the most important theories of the mind to come out the 20th century. The theory, first put forward by Wilfrid Sellars, argues that language is the only means by which humans can learn the types of socially shared practices that permit rationality. Although wedded to important aspects of German idealism, Sellars' theory is couched in bold realist terms of the analytic tradition. Those who are sympathetic to German idealism find this realist's appropriation of German idealism problematic. Wilfrid Sellars, Idealism and Realism thus creates a rare venue for realists and idealists to debate the epistemic outcome of the mental processes they both claim are essential to experience. Their resulting discussion bridges the gap between analytic and continental philosophy. In providing original and accessible chapters on psychological nominalism, this volume raises themes that intersect with numerous disciplines: the philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics. It also provides clarity on arguably the best available account of why humans can reason, be self-aware, know, and act as agents.

Download or read book Robert Brandom s Normative Inferentialism written by Giacomo Turbanti and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2017-09-21 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The philosophy of language of Robert Brandom is based on a theoretical structure composed of three main elements: the normative analysis of linguistic practices, the inferential characterization of conceptual contents and the expressive articulation of the relations between the former two. Normative pragmatics aims to explain how linguistic practices are sufficient to confer contentful states in those who engage in them. Inferential semantics provides a theory of such pragmatic significances in terms of the inferential relations that articulate conceptual contents. Rational expressivism is the thesis that concept application is essentially a process of turning something that can only be done into something that can also be said. Such a threefold structure is the core of normative inferentialism. This book is a concise, self-contained and comprehensive presentation of this philosophical enterprise. It guides the reader through the analysis of Brandom's imposing theoretical apparatus, the discovery of the roots of his approach in American pragmatism and German idealism, till the exploration of some of its most interesting and recent outcomes in pragmatics and semantics. It is a valuable resource for both those who approach Brandom's work for the first time and those who are interested in the potential of normative inferentialism.

Download or read book Three paradoxes of personhood written by Joseph Margolis and published by Mimesis. This book was released on 2017-09-14T00:00:00+02:00 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The starting point of Joseph Margolis’ last philosophical effort is represented by the problem of the human “gap” in animal continuity: “There appear to be no comparable variants of animal evolution [...] effected by anything like the culturally enabled creation”. While we share with other animals more or less refined forms of societal life, acquiring a natural language remains a distinctively human character: although it is grounded in the completely natural favourable changes in the human vocal apparatus and brain, the merely causal emergence of language in humans reacts back into human primates by transforming them into persons or selves. The artifactuality of persons appears to be at the same time a natural and emergent phenomenon, constituting the other side of the process of language acquisition both by early hominids and by human infants. In this perspective the largely informal, mongrel and approximate functionality of ordinary language is interpreted as a good tool for the cultural animal to cope with the world, while the collective dimension of human forms of life appears as the shared context of external and internal constitution of the human selves.

Download or read book Postanalytic and Metacontinental written by Jack Reynolds and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2010-06-03 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: