Robert B. Brandom > Quotes

“To him who looks on the world reductively, the world looks reductively back.”
― Robert B. Brandom

“The decision as to whether to risk one’s actual life or to surrender the ideal self-conception is a decision about who one is.

(from The structure of desire and recognition)”
― Robert Brandom

“On the traditional, heroic conception it is the normative statuses that matter, not the agent’s attitudes. Parricide and incest ought not be. One should not act so as to incur the normative status of father killer and mother fucker.”
― Robert B. Brandom, A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology

“Wrestling with what came to be called the “rule-following considerations” in the wake of Kripke’s reading of Wittgenstein led me to see Hegel as directly addressing what is perhaps the central question that Wittgenstein raised in the vicinity. If all there is to confer meaning on linguistic expressions and content on intentional states is the use that we make of them, the functional role they play in our practices, how is it that such use can institute norms that are determinately contentful, in the sense of providing definite standard for assessments of the correctness of further uses in a whole range of possible novel situations?”
― Robert Brandom

“Cognitively, grasp of just one concept is the sound of one hand clapping.”
― Robert B. Brandom, Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism

“Pragmatism offers a conception of reason that is practical rather than intellectual, expressed in intelligent doings rather than abstract sayings. Flexibility and adaptability are its hallmarks, rather than mastery of unchanging universal principles. It is the reason of Odysseus rather than of Plato.”
― Robert B. Brandom

“Alienation is the inability to bring together these two aspects of Bildung: that self-conscious individuals acknowledging the norms as binding in their practice is what makes those selves what they are, and that self-conscious individuals acknowledging the norms as binding is what makes the norms what they are. These are the authority of the community and its norms over individuals (their dependence on it), and the authority of individuals over the community and its norms (its dependence on them), respectively.”
― Robert Brandom

“While metaethical moral relativism is by no means a consensus view among contemporary theorists of this dimension of normativity (though it has a number of distinguished proponents), its popularity and easy accessibility will be attested to by anyone who has taught undergraduate introductory surveys of moral theory. In this population, at least, as a matter of sociological fact it seems to be contested principally by those whose religious convictions lead them to premodern rejection of any form of attitude-dependence of moral norms.”
― Robert Brandom

“The decision as to whether to risk one’s actual life or to surrender the ideal self-conception is a decision about who one is."
from The structure of desire and recognition”
― Robert Brandom