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Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas
Transcendentalism never came to an end in America. It just went underground for a stretch, but is back in full force in Robert Brandom’s new book. Brandom takes up Kant and Hegel and explores their contemporary significance as if little time had expired since intellectuals gathered around Emerson in Concord to discuss reason and idealism, selves, freedom, and community. Brandom’s discussion belongs to a venerable tradition that distinguishes us as rational animals, and philosophy by its concern to understand, articulate, and explain the notion of reason that is thereby cast in that crucial demarcating role. An emphasis on our capacity to reason, rather than merely to represent, has been growing in philosophy over the last thirty years, and Robert Brandom has been at the center of this development. Reason in Philosophy is the first book that gives a succinct overview of his understanding of the role of reason as the structure at once of our minds and our meanings―what constitutes us as free, responsible agents. The job of philosophy is to introduce concepts and develop expressive tools for expanding our self-consciousness as explicit awareness of our discursive activity of thinking and acting, in the sciences, politics, and the arts. This is a paradigmatic work of contemporary philosophy.
248 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 2009
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About the author
Robert B. Brandom
26 books83 followersRobert 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.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
August 3, 2021
Brandom has a gift for distilling complex ideas into a digestible form for the learned and the unitiated alike, so much so that reading his prose the reader is transported into one of his lectures.
As a philosopher, he moves and breathes in the tradition of inferentialism, which is a distinct kind of rationalism as well as being a conceptual realism; the world is conceptually/inferentially articulated without being causually dependent on the mind. Not only is this the case but that objects in the objective side entail and exclude other objects in the same way that in on the subjective side our takings-of-the-world-to-such-and-such (i.e. commitments) embrace and repel other takings.
But whereas it is either necessary, possible or impossible for an object to entail other objects and exclude other objects, it is merely "impermissible" (48) for a single subject to hold mutually incompatible or contradictory commitments; the subject has a duty (deontic) to ensure maximum consilience between the beliefs they hold. So according to Brandom, stubbornly insisting on integrating such materially incompatible commitments threatens the integrity of the transcendental unity of apperception--an ongoing process of rational synthesis by virtue of which we earn our sapience.
The beasts of the field, including our mammalian, avian and cephalopodic cousins are sentient. But we humans are sapient in addition to being sentient. Sapience isn't a quantative leap from sentience. Likewise, an impressive mastery of of an array of reliable dispositions to differential reponses ("red", "red dress", "red blouse") nonetheless does not amount to concept use, of which descriptions proper form the lowest level of hierarchy. To be a description a word has to stand in relation of inferential inclusion and exclusion to other labels and must be available as a premise to or a conclusion of an inference. As concept users and concept-mongerers, we aren't just denizens of the natural world, we are also citizens of the social world. Our vocabulary to make things explicit, and so to contribute to the labor of the concept, ranks among the crowning achievements of our species.
Now a few words of criticism. Brandom innovates on Kant's teaching on the transcendental synthesis along the pragmatic dimension; sapience is accordingly framed as a kind of semantic self consciousness. Sapient creatures like us, sensitive as we are to the "normative force of better reason" (128), have the lifelong duty to unpack our commitments, endorsing appropriate consequences and rejecting those beliefs that stand a relation of materially incompatibility with the former commitments in a "game of giving and asking for reasons" (119), without which no other language games are possible. Granted this point, it is still a bit suspect to expand Kant's transcendental synthesis along the lines of semantic self-consciousness. After all, did not Kant abundantly made himself clear that the various transcendental syntheses, including and especially the transcendentally synthesis of apperception, happens behinds the back of our heads, so to speak? From the perspective of this restricted definition, Brandom's innovation appears not so much an ampliative reading of the transcendental synthesis as it is a description of a process grounded in the latter. Brandom goes on to consolidate the Kantian point that the institution of norms (binding oneself by rules of one's own making) make positive freedom possible. Still, I would venture to claim that this semantic freedom of concept users is not to be identified with the transcendental synthesis itself.
Furthermore, I am not completely comfortable with Brandom's deflation of truth and the notion that truth does not accomplish the explanatory work that we naively assume it does. Perhaps contemporary proponents of scientific realism would disagree with Brandom on this acccount.
That being said, it is to Brandom's credit that he is able to weave together the key rationalist insights on how we acquire concepts and what concept use entails in the work of Kant, Hegel and all the way to Frege and Sellars, and present them in a clear and succinct narrative, making explicit what was all along implicit in the rationalist tradition. I would recommend this book to anybody who is looking for a decent hands on introduction to what kind of job philosophers do.
As a philosopher, he moves and breathes in the tradition of inferentialism, which is a distinct kind of rationalism as well as being a conceptual realism; the world is conceptually/inferentially articulated without being causually dependent on the mind. Not only is this the case but that objects in the objective side entail and exclude other objects in the same way that in on the subjective side our takings-of-the-world-to-such-and-such (i.e. commitments) embrace and repel other takings.
But whereas it is either necessary, possible or impossible for an object to entail other objects and exclude other objects, it is merely "impermissible" (48) for a single subject to hold mutually incompatible or contradictory commitments; the subject has a duty (deontic) to ensure maximum consilience between the beliefs they hold. So according to Brandom, stubbornly insisting on integrating such materially incompatible commitments threatens the integrity of the transcendental unity of apperception--an ongoing process of rational synthesis by virtue of which we earn our sapience.
The beasts of the field, including our mammalian, avian and cephalopodic cousins are sentient. But we humans are sapient in addition to being sentient. Sapience isn't a quantative leap from sentience. Likewise, an impressive mastery of of an array of reliable dispositions to differential reponses ("red", "red dress", "red blouse") nonetheless does not amount to concept use, of which descriptions proper form the lowest level of hierarchy. To be a description a word has to stand in relation of inferential inclusion and exclusion to other labels and must be available as a premise to or a conclusion of an inference. As concept users and concept-mongerers, we aren't just denizens of the natural world, we are also citizens of the social world. Our vocabulary to make things explicit, and so to contribute to the labor of the concept, ranks among the crowning achievements of our species.
Now a few words of criticism. Brandom innovates on Kant's teaching on the transcendental synthesis along the pragmatic dimension; sapience is accordingly framed as a kind of semantic self consciousness. Sapient creatures like us, sensitive as we are to the "normative force of better reason" (128), have the lifelong duty to unpack our commitments, endorsing appropriate consequences and rejecting those beliefs that stand a relation of materially incompatibility with the former commitments in a "game of giving and asking for reasons" (119), without which no other language games are possible. Granted this point, it is still a bit suspect to expand Kant's transcendental synthesis along the lines of semantic self-consciousness. After all, did not Kant abundantly made himself clear that the various transcendental syntheses, including and especially the transcendentally synthesis of apperception, happens behinds the back of our heads, so to speak? From the perspective of this restricted definition, Brandom's innovation appears not so much an ampliative reading of the transcendental synthesis as it is a description of a process grounded in the latter. Brandom goes on to consolidate the Kantian point that the institution of norms (binding oneself by rules of one's own making) make positive freedom possible. Still, I would venture to claim that this semantic freedom of concept users is not to be identified with the transcendental synthesis itself.
Furthermore, I am not completely comfortable with Brandom's deflation of truth and the notion that truth does not accomplish the explanatory work that we naively assume it does. Perhaps contemporary proponents of scientific realism would disagree with Brandom on this acccount.
That being said, it is to Brandom's credit that he is able to weave together the key rationalist insights on how we acquire concepts and what concept use entails in the work of Kant, Hegel and all the way to Frege and Sellars, and present them in a clear and succinct narrative, making explicit what was all along implicit in the rationalist tradition. I would recommend this book to anybody who is looking for a decent hands on introduction to what kind of job philosophers do.
March 1, 2021
I found this to be a good work on thinking about thinking: what it is that we are doing when we communicate with other people, how we structure society, so that some people have roles of authority, and what it means to have a reason, and to put together and maintain a worldview. Although I've read a lot of philosophy, I am not a professional philosopher, just someone trying to make sense of the world, and this helped.
I am currently reading Brandom's Heroism and Magnanimity monograph, which is apparently related to A Spirit of Trust, and I am glad that I read this first; it provides a slightly easier introduction to his terminology and framework for describing normativity that make that later work easier to read.
I am currently reading Brandom's Heroism and Magnanimity monograph, which is apparently related to A Spirit of Trust, and I am glad that I read this first; it provides a slightly easier introduction to his terminology and framework for describing normativity that make that later work easier to read.
August 1, 2023
Brandom is all about inferences: he thinks we should understand the meaning of a sentence as the role it plays in chains of inferences, or as what a community takes the sentence to imply or to be implied by. Philosophy is an attempt to wrestle with what this might mean for us as human agents and knowers. His reach in philosophy is broad and deep, though he keeps circling around Kant, Hegel, and Wilfrid Sellars. In the first part of this book he recounts how Kant and Hegel connected this idea of "inferentialism" to matters of freedom, community, and autonomy, and in the second part he shows how the key ideas illuminate various other topics in philosophy.
It is not a book I would recommend to anyone without an advanced degree in philosophy, though at the same time I am enormously impressed by Brandom's ability to integrate important ideas with more familiar and even everyday phenomena.
It is not a book I would recommend to anyone without an advanced degree in philosophy, though at the same time I am enormously impressed by Brandom's ability to integrate important ideas with more familiar and even everyday phenomena.
October 31, 2023
Bit torn about this one. On the one hand I found the first chapter on Kant simply extraordinary, maybe one of my favourite philosophy chapters ever, and maybe the book should deserve five stars just for that.On the whole the first part is kind of a must read, even though he gets much more repetitive in order to get his point across.
But on the other hand a lot of the rest was less well expressed or just less interesting. Great bits in the second part though, of course.
The best parts of this volume and of its companion on pragmatism would make for an extraordinarily strong book of philosophy.
But on the other hand a lot of the rest was less well expressed or just less interesting. Great bits in the second part though, of course.
The best parts of this volume and of its companion on pragmatism would make for an extraordinarily strong book of philosophy.
August 2, 2022
Maravilloso. Sobre todo los tres primeros ensayos sobre Kant y Hegel.
May 10, 2010
Despite disagreeing with Brandom on many points, I do think this set of papers presents an interesting view. The arguments are thin at times but the proposal is provocative.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews