Philosophy
Brandom's work is heavily influenced by that of Wilfrid Sellars, Richard Rorty, Michael Dummett and his Pittsburgh colleague John McDowell. He also draws heavily on the works of Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Gottlob Frege, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
He is best known for his investigations of linguistic meanings, or semantics. He advocates the view that the meaning of an expression is fixed by how it is used in inferences (see inferential role semantics). This project is developed at length in his influential 1994 book, Making It Explicit, and more briefly in Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (2000).
Brandom has also published a collection of essays on the history of philosophy, Tales of the Mighty Dead (2002), a critical and historical sketch of what he calls the "philosophy of intentionality". He is the editor of a collection of papers about Richard Rorty's philosophy, Rorty and His Critics (2000). He delivered the 2006 John Locke lectures at Oxford University, and they have been published by Oxford University Press under the title Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism (2008). Brandom is currently working on a book dealing with Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.
| Notable teachers | |
|---|---|
|
|
| Notable students | |
|
Read more about this topic: Robert Brandom
Famous quotes containing the word philosophy:
“My philosophy is that to be a director you cannot be subject to anyone, even the head of the studio. I threatened to quit each time I didn’t get my way, but no one ever let me walk out.”
—Dorothy Arzner (1900–1979)
“Frankly, I do not like the idea of conversations to define the term “unconditional surrender.” ... The German people can have dinned into their ears what I said in my Christmas Eve speech—in effect, that we have no thought of destroying the German people and that we want them to live through the generations like other European peoples on condition, of course, that they get rid of their present philosophy of conquest.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“The philosopher’s conception of things will, above all, be truer than other men’s, and his philosophy will subordinate all the circumstances of life. To live like a philosopher is to live, not foolishly, like other men, but wisely and according to universal laws.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)