Robert B. Brandom is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh and a Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy. He delivered the John Locke Lectures at the University of Oxford and the Woodbridge Lectures at Columbia University. Brandom is the author of many books, including Making It Explicit, Reason in Philosophy, and From Empiricism to Expressivism.
Brandom writes about complex issues with a remarkable clarity. In this book, he both develops his project in new directions (compared with MIE) but also shows how it relates to the aims of classical analytic philosophy and pragmatism. In short, Brandom argues that by thinking about what people have to do be saying something, we can think about philosophical analysis in a broader way. As always, Brandom seems to flirt with a reductive naturalism that would explain normativity in terms of more basic, non-normative notions, acknowledging that such an approach is inadequate, without fully articulating the limits of such limitations. In the light of notion of pragmatic analysis, Brandom's discussion of hermeneutics and tactic knowledge is particularly insightful.