Written in the 1960s, TRUTH AND METHOD is Gadamer's magnum opus. Looking behind the self-consciousness of science, he discusses the tense relationship between truth and methodology. In examining the different experiences of truth, he aims to "present the hermeneutic phenomenon in its fullest extent.

This article makes a case for the capacity of "social practice" accounts of agency and freedom to criticize, resist, and transform systemic forms of power and domination from within the context of religious and political practices and institutions. I first examine criticisms that Michel Foucault's analysis of systemic power results in normative aimlessness, and then I contrast that account with the description of agency and innovative practice that pragmatist philosopher Robert Brandom identifies as "expressive freedom." I argue that Brandom can (...) provide a normative trajectory for Foucault's diagnoses of power and domination, helping to resolve its apparent lack of ethical direction. I demonstrate that Foucault, in turn, presents Brandom with insights that might overcome the charges of abstraction and conservatism that his pragmatic inferentialism frequently encounters. The result is a vindication of social practice as an analytical lens for social criticism that is at once both immanent and radical. (shrink)

This edition includes new essays by philosopher Michael Williams and literary scholar David Bromwich, as well as Rorty's previously unpublished essay "The ...

In this paper I will examine one way of developing Kant's suggestion that one is free just insofar as he acts according to the dictates of norms or principles. and of his distinction between the Realm of Nature, governed by causes, and the Realm of Freedom, governed by norms and principles. Kant's transcendental machinery—the distinction between Understanding and Reason, the free noumenal self expressed somehow as a causally constrained phenomenal self, and so on—can no longer secure this distinction for us. (...) It is just too mysterious to serve as an explanation of freedom. Yet some distinction between the realm of facts and the realm of norms must be established if the notion of freedom as normative rather than causal constraint is to be redeemed. In this paper I will present a version of this distinction which was not envisioned by Kant, and show how a novel response to the dispute between naturalists and non-naturalists concerning the relation of fact to norm can be developed out of that rendering. I will then argue that the account of human freedom which results from this story needs to be supplemented in just the ways which Hegel claimed Kant's account needed to be supplemented, and will recommend an Hegelian self-expressive successor. (shrink)

The two main challenges of the theory of conceptual content presented by Robert Brandom in Making It Explicit are to account for a referential dimension of conceptual content and to account for the objectivity of conceptual norms. Brandom tries to meet both these challenges in chapter 8 of his book. I argue that the accounts presented there can only be understood if seen against the background of Brandom's theory of communication developed in chapter 7. This theory is motivated by the (...) well-known problem that semantic holism threatens the possibility of communication because it has the consequence that words mean different things in different mouths. Brandom offers a solution to this problem in terms of what he calls recurrence commitments. I show that chapter 8 of Making It Explicit should be understood as arguing that a practice that includes acknowledging interpersonal recurrence commitments institutes both conceptual contents with a referential dimension and objective conceptual norms. I close by raising the objection that Brandom's argument can only show that conceptual norms are communally shared and not that they are objective. I propose an emendation of this argument, having recourse to a practice Brandom refers to as rational rectification in his new book Between Saying and Doing. (shrink)

Essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy of language and mind, Reading Brandom is also an excellent companion volume to Reading McDowell: On ...

In “Knowledge and the Internal” John McDowell presents a deep and interesting argument. I think everything he says is true and important. Still, there are a number of points that bear expanding on in order to be properly understood. So I want to say something about his point of departure: the idea of standings in the space of reasons. And I want to fill in further the picture at which he finally arrives, by saying how I think we ought to (...) understand knowledge as a standing in the space of reasons, once we have freed ourselves from a prevalent deformed conception of that space. McDowell’s strategy is to show that that conception of the space of reasons is inadequate—that it deserves to be called a ‘deformation’—by showing that it leaves no room for anything recognizable as knowledge. I’ll try to reconstruct that argument by showing what it looks like in the context of a crucial dimension of the space of reasons that McDowell never mentions: its essentially social articulation. The effect of this supplementation, I think, is not to turn a bad argument into a good one, but to turn what is already a good argument into one that further illuminates the phenomena with which it deals. (shrink)

Written in the 1960s, TRUTH AND METHOD is Gadamer's magnum opus.

This new work provides an approachable introduction to the complex system that Making It Explicit mapped out.

Arendt's innovation is to recognize that this countenancing of others is an aesthetic experience that creates the political world.Curtis plumbs the relevance of ...

In this paper, I examine two versions of the so-called “hierarchical” approach to personal autonomy, based on the notion of “second-order desires”. My primary concern will be with the question of whether these approaches provide an adequate basis for understanding the dynamics of autonomy-ascription. I begin by distinguishing two versions of the hierarchical approach, each representing a different response to the oft-discussed “regress” objection. I then argue that both “structural hierarchicalism” (e.g., Frankfurt, Bratman) and “procedural hierarchicalism” (e.g., Dworkin, Christman, Mele) (...) have difficulties accommodating the dynamics of how the attribution of autonomy to persons is claimed, disputed, and resolved. Although they differ in details, both shortcomings can be traced to viewing autonomy as a metaphysical rather than a normative, practical matter. I conclude by suggesting that these difficulties underscore the advantages of a more constructivist and pragmatist. (shrink)

Brandom's "inferentialism"—his theory that contentfulness consists in being governed by inferential norms—proves dubiously compatible with his own deflationary approach to intentional objectivity. This is because a deflationist argument, adapted from the case of truth to that of correct inference, undermines the criterion of adequacy Brandom employs in motivating inferentialism. Once that constraint is abandoned, moreover, the very constitutive-explanatory availability of Brandom's inferential norms becomes suspect. Yet Brandom intertwines inferentialism with a separate explanatory project, one that in explaining the pragmatic significance (...) of meaning-attributions does yield a convincing construal of the claim that the concept of meaning is normative. (shrink)

What would something unlike us--a chimpanzee, say, or a computer--have to be able to do to qualify as a possible knower, like us? To answer this question at the very heart of our sense of ourselves, philosophers have long focused on intentionality and have looked to language as a key to this condition. Making It Explicit is an investigation into the nature of language--the social practices that distinguish us as rational, logical creatures--that revises the very terms of this inquiry. Where (...) accounts of the relation between language and mind have traditionally rested on the concept of representation, this book sets out an alternate approach based on inference, and on a conception of certain kinds of implicit assessment that become explicit in language. Making It Explicit is the first attempt to work out in detail a theory that renders linguistic meaning in terms of use--in short, to explain how semantic content can be conferred on expressions and attitudes that are suitably caught up in social practices. -/- At the center of this enterprise is a notion of discursive commitment. Being able to talk--and so in the fullest sense being able to think--is a matter of mastering the practices that govern such commitments, being able to keep track of one’s own commitments and those of others. Assessing the pragmatic significance of speech acts is a matter of explaining the explicit in terms of the implicit. As he traces the inferential structure of the social practices within which things can be made conceptually explicit, the author defines the distinctively expressive role of logical vocabulary. This expressive account of language, mind, and logic is, finally, an account of who we are. (shrink)

In Making it Explicit, Brandom aims to articulate an account of conceptual content that accommodates its normativity—a requirement on theories of content that Brandom traces to Wittgenstein's rule following considerations. It is widely held that the normativity requirement cannot be met, or at least not with ease, because theories of content face an intractable dilemma. Brandom proposes to evade the dilemma by adopting a middle road—one that uses normative vocabulary, but treats norms as implicit in practices. I argue that this (...) proposal fails to evade the dilemma, as Brandom himself understands it. Despite his use of normative vocabulary, Brandom's theory fares no better than the reductionist theories he criticises. I consider some responses that Brandom might make to my charges, and finally conclude that his proposal founders on his own criteria. (shrink)

Offering both a discussion of feminism in its postmodern context and a critique of contemporary theory, the author here challenges feminists to move away from a theory-based approach, which focuses on securing or contesting "women" as an ...

How can we understand the world as a whole instead of separate natural and human realms? Joseph T. Rouse proposes an approach to this classic problem based on radical new conceptions of both philosophical naturalism and scientific practice.

(2002). Normativity as the Key to Objectivity: An Exploration of Robert Brandom's Articulating Reasons. Inquiry: Vol. 45, No. 3, pp. 373-391.

In “Knowledge and the Internal” John McDowell presents a deep and interesting argument. I think everything he says is true and important. Still, there are a number of points that bear expanding on in order to be properly understood. So I want to say something about his point of departure: the idea of standings in the space of reasons. And I want to fill in further the picture at which he finally arrives, by saying how I think we ought to (...) understand knowledge as a standing in the space of reasons, once we have freed ourselves from a prevalent deformed conception of that space. McDowell’s strategy is to show that that conception of the space of reasons is inadequate—that it deserves to be called a ‘deformation’—by showing that it leaves no room for anything recognizable as knowledge. I’ll try to reconstruct that argument by showing what it looks like in the context of a crucial dimension of the space of reasons that McDowell never mentions: its essentially social articulation. The effect of this supplementation, I think, is not to turn a bad argument into a good one, but to turn what is already a good argument into one that further illuminates the phenomena with which it deals. (shrink)

This is a paradigmatic work of contemporary philosophy.

Agon as analytic, diagnostic, and antidote -- Contesting Homer: the poiesis of value -- Contesting Socrates: Nietzsche's (artful) naturalism -- Contesting Paul: toward an ethos of agonism -- Contesting Wagner: how one becomes what one is.

I give a rough outline of Brandom’s scorekeeping account of conceptual content. The account is meant to be phenomenalist, normativist, expressively complete and non-circular; the question is how and to what extent it succeeds in meeting these goals.

In recent years, several systematic theories of linguistic meaning have been offered that give pride of place to linguistic practice, or the process of linguistic communication. Often these theories are referred to as neo-pragmatist or new pragmatist; I call them 'practice-based'. According to practice-based theories of meaning, the process of linguistic communication is somehow constitutive of, or otherwise essential for the existence of, propositional linguistic meaning. Moreover, these theories disavow, or downplay, the semantic importance of inflationary notions of representation. I (...) introduce the basic ideas and motives behind some practice-based theories of meaning, and offer some reasons why an eliminativist, non-quietist, epistemic practice-based approach to meaning that 1) disavows any explanatory role for the linguistic community as such, 2) prioritizes sentence meaning over word meaning, and 3) may , in the end, be naturalistic, should be favored over its practice-based competitors. (shrink)

We discuss first a "stance" methodology toward the problem of personhood. This is to ask first, what it is to take something to be a person, and then to move via a notion of appropriateness to an answer to what it is to be a person. We argue that the distinctions between persons and non-persons, between agents and patients, and between subjects and mere objects are deeply connected. All three distinctions are themselves traced to a fundamental distinction within the space (...) of reasons -- between, that is, two sorts of material inferential propriety. These two structures of inference are made explicit by indicative and subjunctive conditionals. Tracing personhood to the fundamentally stereoscopic structure of material inference sheds light not only on notions of freedom, agency, and personhood, but on the nature of modal judgments, on the conceptual space of causation, and on the semantics of the explicitating conditionals. We conclude with a pragmatic argument for belief in persons. (shrink)

The central challenge to Brandom¿s theory of propositional content, as he himself acknowledges, is to meet the following two apparently conflicting conditions of adequacy he lays down for such a theory: It must do justice to the objectivity of conceptual norms and it should embody a phenomenalist approach to normativity, according to which normative statuses must be understood as being instituted by practical normative attitudes. The strategy Brandom employs for reconciling these requirements is intricate and somewhat elusive. This paper aims (...) to make it more accessible by reconstructing its main outline. I hope to show thereby that an objection raised by Rödl against Brandom¿s account of objectivity is based on a misconception of that strategy. (shrink)