{"title":"Books by Robert B. Brandom","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9780192870216","title":"Pragmatism and Idealism","description":"In this short book, based upon his Spinoza Lectures at the University of Amsterdam, Robert B. Brandom offers a pragmatist approach to representation and reality, drawing on Richard Rorty and Hegel. During the last decade of his life, Rorty emphasized the anti-authoritarian credentials of his pragmatism. He came to see pragmatism as the fighting faith of a second phase of the Enlightenment. The first stage, as Rorty construed it, concerned our emancipation from nonhuman authority in practical matters: issues of what we ought to do and how things ought to be. The envisaged second stage addresses rather our emancipation from nonhuman authority in theoretical matters.Brandom shows how pragmatism moves beyond the traditional model of reality as authoritative over our cognitive representations of it in language and thought, to a new conception of how discursive practices help us cope with the vicissitudes of life. Hegel anticipates the challenge to the very idea of objective reality as providing norms for thought which Rorty believed required us to enact a second phase of the Enlightenment. Unlike Rorty, Hegel presents a detailed, constructive, anti-authoritarian, non-fetishistic, social pragmatist account of the representational dimension of conceptual content. At its heart is an account of the social dimension of discursive normativity in terms of reciprocal recognition, and an account of the historical dimension of discursive normativity in terms of a distinctive new conception of reason: the recollective rationality that turns a past into a tradition. His idealism thereby offers a concrete pragmatist alternative to Rorty's global semantic and epistemological anti-representationalism.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56225981104501,"sku":"9780192870216","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780192870216_bdafe6e9-0d59-4c46-9d84-c30cf907a6c4.jpg?v=1786011314"},{"product_id":"9780674725836","title":"Reason in Philosophy – Animating Ideas","description":"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 sapients: 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.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56294249464181,"sku":"9780674725836","price":26.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780674725836_785e28e1-0412-4490-915b-1d4c0cb8ec75.jpg?v=1786014836"},{"product_id":"9780674543300","title":"Making It Explicit – Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Paper)","description":"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.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56294260539765,"sku":"9780674543300","price":40.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780674543300_086e9318-2da7-4bda-ac88-585ead8d2db9.jpg?v=1786032858"},{"product_id":"9780674976818","title":"A Spirit of Trust – A Reading of Hegel′s Phenomenology","description":"Forty years in the making, this long-awaited reinterpretation of Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit is a landmark contribution to philosophy by one of the world’s best-known and most influential philosophers.   In this much-anticipated work, Robert Brandom presents a completely new retelling of the romantic rationalist adventure of ideas that is Hegel’s classic The Phenomenology of Spirit. Connecting analytic, continental, and historical traditions, Brandom shows how dominant modes of thought in contemporary philosophy are challenged by Hegel.   A Spirit of Trust is about the massive historical shift in the life of humankind that constitutes the advent of modernity. In his Critiques, Kant talks about the distinction between what things are in themselves and how they appear to us; Hegel sees Kant’s distinction as making explicit what separates the ancient and modern worlds. In the ancient world, normative statuses—judgments of what ought to be—were taken to state objective facts. In the modern world, these judgments are taken to be determined by attitudes—subjective stances. Hegel supports a view combining both of those approaches, which Brandom calls “objective idealism”: there is an objective reality, but we cannot make sense of it without first making sense of how we think about it.   According to Hegel’s approach, we become agents only when taken as such by other agents. This means that normative statuses such as commitment, responsibility, and authority are instituted by social practices of reciprocal recognition. Brandom argues that when our self-conscious recognitive attitudes take the radical form of magnanimity and trust that Hegel describes, we can overcome a troubled modernity and enter a new age of spirit.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56294333088117,"sku":"9780674976818","price":41.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780674976818_c6188309-49dd-4236-aebe-0beb556d4fcc.jpg?v=1786014914"},{"product_id":"reasons-for-logic-logic-for-reasons","title":"Reasons for Logic, Logic for Reasons","description":"\u003cp\u003eThis book presents a philosophical conception of logic - \"logical expressivism\"- according to which the role of logic is to make explicit reason relations, which are often neither monotonic nor transitive. It reveals new perspectives on inferential roles, sequent calculi, representation, truthmakers, and many extant logical theories.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57483253776757,"sku":"9781032360775","price":44.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781032360775.jpg?v=1786178376"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-robert-b-brandom.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}