Search Results

In his Tales of the Mighty Dead, Robert B. Brandom's discussion of Sellars's two-ply account of observation and critique of Cartesian philosophies of mind makes several crucial errors that would render Sellars's analysis of ‘looks’-sentences incoherent. Brandom does not recognize the difference in ‘level’ between observation reports concerning physical objects and ‘looks’-reports, and he denies that ‘looks’-sentences are reports or even make claims. Furthermore, he does not recognize the importance of the nonconceptual content of experiential states. This chapter argues that a careful reading of ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’ does not support Brandom's interpretation, and show how to read Sellars properly on the analysis of such sentences.

There is often thought to be an asymmetry between belief and desire, such that belief is more rational than desire, or possessed of cognitive content that desire lacks. In this chapter, it is argued that this sort of asymmetry thesis is difficult to sustain when beliefs and desires are thought of as propositional attitudes. The most common arguments for the asymmetry view all depend upon a problematic form of epistemic foundationalism. When this sort of foundationalism is rejected, there is no reason to treat desires, or preferences more generally, as less susceptible to rational deliberation and control than beliefs.

Brandom is drawn to Hegel as an early, implicit, illuminating manifestation of his own account of the essential elements of a successful explanation of intentionality: that it be functionalist, inferentialist, holist, normative, social pragmatist, and historically inflected. Brandom wants to claim that intentionality depends on normativity, the achievement of socially recognized normative statuses constituted by normative attitudes, and in such a context, Brandom’s Hegel has to qualify as the most promising Brandomian, avant la lettre. My questions in this chapter are whether the full dimensions of Hegel’s understanding of the relation between practical and theoretical philosophy are available to Brandom, whether Brandom’s account of the role of history in Hegel is sufficiently robust, and whether his approach has accounted for Hegel’s conception of idealism.

Frei's appeals to the "givenness" of revelation-the claim, for instance, that all doctrines or theological assertions are directly or indirectly grounded in faith, or that faith is rational in that it seeks understanding within a set of reasons afforded by God's revelatory activity in Scripture-incur charges of "revelational foundationalism." Chapter 6 employs recent treatments of epistemic foundationalism in order to dispel charges of "crypto-foundationalism" as well as answering the equally frequent charge that talk of "rationality intrinsic to faith" implicates Frei's thought in a type of fideism.

The positions of Brandom and Millikan are compared with respect to their common origins in the works of Wilfrid Sellars and Wittgenstein. Millikan takes more seriously the “picturing” themes from Sellars and Wittgenstein. Brandom follows Sellars more closely in deriving the normativity of language from social practice, although there are also hints of a possible derivation from evolutionary theory in Sellars. An important claim common to Brandom and Millikan is that there are no representations without function or “attitude”.

Some of our beliefs are the product of reasoning. What is involved when we reason from one belief, or one set of beliefs, to another? Some philosophers have held that all that is involved here is some sort of causal relationship between the former belief (or beliefs) and the latter. Others have held, however, that something more is required: One must have reflected on the transition from the former to the latter and formed the belief that such a transition is warranted. It is argued, following Lewis Carroll, that such a view leads to an infinite regress. A number of technical solutions to the regress problem are considered and found to be implausible. In addition, it is argued that the reflective requirement presupposes some substantive psychological theses about the differences between human and animal cognition, and these psychological claims are, in fact, false.

Naturalists have at least three core commitments: refusing appeals to what is supernatural or transcendent to nature; making scientific understanding central to philosophical understanding; and repudiating any “first philosophy” as authoritative over the sciences. This introductory chapter emphasizes that naturalism is a historically developing project, as new scientific work and philosophical criticisms of earlier versions of naturalism revise our understanding of these naturalistic commitments, and how they can be upheld. Naturalism nowadays is more influentially shaped by Sellars’s aspiration to fuse the scientific and manifest images than by Quine’s version of naturalism. This chapter explains how the prospects for a defensible naturalism have been advanced by three important, mutually supportive developments: John Haugeland’s, Robert Brandom’s and John McDowell’s refinements of the manifest image; philosophical and interdisciplinary studies of scientific practice; and recent developments in evolutionary biology that extend and revise the neo-Darwinian “modern synthesis”, especially niche construction. The chapter concludes by previewing the book’s revised account of conceptual understanding and scientific practice, and how it more adequately satisfies naturalists’ core commitments.

The realization, following the revolution in physics of the last century, that contrary to Kant, the constitutive synthetic apriori of a science is liable to be radically changed, forcefully raised the question of the rationality of scientific framework transitions in a way that could not be sidestepped as in other areas of philosophy. Kuhn’s preposterous likening of such transitions to religious conversions and gestalt switches was as unacceptable as Popper’s infamous pooh-poohing of the very idea of framework dependency. Building on The View from Within, the chapter goes on to analyze the transformative potential of external critique, against the backdrop of Brandom’s neo-Hegelian attempt to discern the role of inter-subjective engagement in the intra-subjective life of the rational self (which constitutes the book’s third bias). Criticism’s normative import is gauged by distinguishing it from testing, and the importance of leveling it from its addressees’ perspective, by distinguishing criticism from mere doubting. However, normative criticism cannot be thus leveled, without some measure of untruthfulness. Here, it is argued, in the unavoidable incongruity between our deontic self-image and the deontic portrayals of us premised by the arguments of our external normative critics, lies the key to their potentially ambivalating effect.

This first chapter of The Weimar Origins of Rhetorical Inquiry sets out the book’s basic problem. Scholars have recognized the importance of German intellectual culture forged in the context of the Weimar Republic between 1918 and 1933, and they have traced the impact of Weimar thinkers on a host of different disciplines. This is certainly true in political theory, so much so that one can even reconstruct something like a “standard received version” of Weimar political thought and its influence. Partly as a result of repetition, it is more difficult now to narrate this standard received version with conviction and subtlety. Weimar Origins begins with an alternative hypothesis. We can rejuvenate these narratives of disciplinary origin by foregrounding an intellectual tradition that scholars of Weimar have passed over almost in silence: rhetoric. The introduction demonstrates this point by using rhetoric to redescribe an inquiry sequence running through Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, Hans Baron, and Theodor Adorno. Drawing on the philosophical work of Robert Brandom, the chapter lays out an account of intellectual history that guides its bid to demonstrate that a new history of Weimar ideas may legitimately open up fresh lines of inquiry today.

Chapter 2 offers a systematic account of the first two of the three philosophical pre-commitments that mark the book’s philosophical point of departure. The first, harking back to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, is to the Framework Dependency of all judgment. The second, to the kind of reflective, free-willed self-governance on which normativity and agency are made to turn in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. The similarly committed neo-Kantian accounts of self and agency proposed in the writings of Christine Korsgaard, Charles Taylor, Harry Frankfurt and John McDowell are shown to premise an apriori given normative stopping point in order to ground the element of normative self-criticism at play at the heart of their various accounts, and, therefore, necessarily immune to it. The Chapter ends with a critique of Brandom’s recent Kantian portrayal of the self-critical nature of human selfhood, which avoids premising a normative stopping point, but only the price of steering wide of normativity altogether.

Chapter 8 employs insights from the work of pragmatist philosophers Wilfrid Sellars, Robert Brandom, Jeffrey Stout, and speech-act theory to further clarify, enrich, and expand Frei's account of literal reading and the plain sense of scripture. It aims to identify and sort out the several delicately interwoven strands of normative constraint in scriptural practices which easily become tangled in Frei's latest writings. Such tangles obscure the nuances of his claims and invite charges that Frei, for instance, merely offers cultural-linguistic correction of his earlier claims about realistic narrative, and that what inevitably ensues is a textual "warranted assertability" that collapses meaning into the community of readers' uses of the text.

This chapter develops a social practical account of religious experience that integrates experience and meaning and addresses the criticisms that experience is too subjective and private to serve as a fit object for scholarly inquiry. Drawing from the pragmatist philosophy of Robert Brandom, this chapter argues that experiences are social practical affairs, in that they are perceptual events that require that the experiencer be socialized into a linguistic community. This view of experiences should lead to the rejection of the claims of perennialists, that there are universal and/or nonconceptual mystical experiences. Turning to the insider/outsider problem, this chapter argues that insiders do have a distinctive position in relation to their own experiencers, but that the asymmetry between the insider and outsider is not absolute. Furthermore, in many cases, the outsider can have superior knowledge about the experience. This chapter concludes with an assessment of the possible compatibility of neuroscience, cognitive science, and evolutionary psychology with a social practical theory of religion.

Does Holmes’s social inductivism have an account of validation, or the justification of legal knowledge? Holmes viewed struggle as inevitable. Conflicts of principle imply social problems, which must somehow be resolved. War was the result of failure of resolution by consensual means. This implies a radical dialectic in the growth of human knowledge. Unlike Hegel, and analytical pragmatist writers like Robert Brandom, Holmes fully naturalizes the dialectic. Validation is radically inductive; it lies in the growth of knowledge by empirical and cooperative solution of human problems. Holmes is among the few writers who have elaborated the relevance of conflict to human knowledge, and is the first to introduce a conflict model of empiricism and logical induction. His famous skepticism adds a cautionary realism to Mill’s meliorism, emphasizing the precarious nature of the human endeavor. Its meliorist dimension lies in the insight that human conflict is not inherently violent and grounded in vengeance, but has itself been subject to transformation, as reflected in the evolution of liability in English common law. Restraint and humility in the face of yet-incomplete experience provides the only reliable path for judges in intractable controversies, and ultimately for the survival and flourishing of the human race.

This chapter is about the philosophical use of history, especially as practiced in post-Kantian philosophy. It expands on the author’s earlier books, which have argued that philosophy has become most valuable recently when it has made an historical turn. It has focused on its own history through critical appropriation, which is forward looking and contrasts with either sticking with the “mere living” or just turning back to, or simply forgetting, the “dead.” The chapter argues that while some Hegelian approaches, such as Robert Brandom’s recent work, practice something like this approach, they also suffer from a lack of appreciation for other strands in post-Kantian thought, especially Early German Romanticism, and they offer a Hegelian approach to history that is not sufficiently radical in its understanding of change and autonomy. It contrasts systematic Idealist with Romantic approaches to history, and defends the latter while noting similarities between Bernard Williams’s work and the Romantics.

This chapter recounts the early history of non-descriptive approaches to modality and why they fell out of favor. It begins by tracing the challenges of understanding modality back to British empiricists such as Hume and Mill. It then moves to discussing the form of modal conventionalism developed by Moritz Schlick and promoted by A. J. Ayer, and examines common criticisms raised against conventionalism—finding that they misconstrue the view. The chapter also recounts Wittgenstein’s development of a view along these lines, along with later developments of non-descriptive views by Ramsey, Ryle, and Sellars. Such views encountered familiar problems such as the Frege-Geach or “embedding” problem, and later barriers arose with the work of Quine and Kripke. The challenge is thus laid out for a contemporary non-descriptivist view to show how it can overcome these historical barriers.

The four words of my title form a set of cardinal points in current debates about semantic theory and the shape it should take. This chapter notes that in the contemporary debates most combinations are found and probably as many denials that those combinations can be motivated, or coherent, or even consistent. Yet, there are reasonable readings of all of them on which these questions become focused and even capable of fairly definitive answers. It is the purpose of this chapter to lay out the landscape and to invite others to use my marks in the jungle when plotting their own routes.

Obligation is a feature of accountability relations among moral agents, who track their own and one another’s commitments and entitlements. When we have grasped the semantic-pragmatic shape of obligation as marked out by the blameworthy, we have understood its binding character and do not need a theory of its nature or essence beyond what it is as manifest kind. Efforts to distinguish worth-regarding from moral obligations (Wolterstorff) or state-of-the-world-regarding from second-personal obligations (Darwall) are shown by the chapter to be unsuccessful. Further, first-personal and second-personal authority stand and fall together; one awakens to the task of unifying one’s own agency only as one is addressed by others as an agent. Being perfected as a moral agent takes place only insofar as one’s participation in these accountability relations, too, is perfected. Yet it is because perfecting these accountability relations is itself good that one has reason to perfect them. Hence, the chapter argues, ecstatic eudaimonism fits hand in glove with this account of obligation.

This chapter discusses Adorno’s method, again, this time focusing on his notion of a ‘model.’ It situates Adorno amidst contemporary discussion of normativity and also connects Adorno to ordinary language philosophy, especially J.L. Austin and Stanley Cavell, and moral perfectionism.

Divine command theory contends that the source, constitution, and binding force of moral obligation are properly accounted for by reference to divine will and/or command. This chapter identifies the pragmatic-semantic role of the deontic term obligation, arguing that there is no distinctively moral kind of obligation; to say of something that it is a moral obligation is just to express that it is binding on pain of incurring deserved blame. The chapter examines the divine command theories of Robert Merrihew Adams and John Hare, arguing that Christians can affirm the authority and significance of divine commands without embracing divine command theories of moral obligation or sui generis “moral” reasons. The chapter goes on to suggest that Hare’s approach, by highlighting the necessary truth that God is to be obeyed, invites us to attend to other such necessary truths, and the ways in which norms are constitutive of all concepts.