Robert Brandom

  • Distinguished Professor of Philosophy

Bob Brandom works on the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of logic, on German idealism and neo-pragmatism, and on Wilfrid Sellars.  His most important books are Making It Explicit (Harvard, 1994) and Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism (Oxford, 2008).  His most recent books are Perspectives on Pragmatism (Harvard, 2011) and Reason in Philosophy (Harvard 2009). Forthcoming in 2014 are Wiedererinnerter Idealismus, from Suhrkamp, and From Empiricism to Expressivism: Brandom Reads Sellars, from Harvard.  Bob has given the John Locke lectures at Oxford, the Hempel lectures at Princeton, the Howison and Townsend lectures at Berkeley, a William James lecture at Harvard, and the Woodbridge lectures at Columbia.  He has held fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and at All Souls College Oxford.  In 2002 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2004 he received the Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities Award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in the amount of $1.5 million.

Representative Publications

  • Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality, Harvard University Press, Fall 2002, ISBN#0-674-00903-7; 430 pp.
  • Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment, Harvard University Press (Cambridge) 1994. 741 pp. ISBN#0-674-54319-X 9 (cloth), #0-674-54330-0 (paper).
  • Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism, Harvard University Press, May 2000; 230 pp. (Paperback edition, August, 2001) ISBN#0-674-00158-3 (cloth), #0-674-00692-5 paper).
  • Rorty and His Critics, Edited, with an Introduction (includes "Vocabularies of Pragmatism") by Robert Brandom; Original essays by: Rorty, Habermas, Davidson, Putnam, Dennett, McDowell, Bouveresse, Brandom, Williams, Allen, Bilgrami, Conant, and Ramberg. Blackwell's Publishers, Oxford, July 2000. ISBN#0-631-20981-6 (cloth), #0-631-20982-4 (paper).
  • "When Philosophy Paints its Grey on Grey: Irony and the Pragmatist Enlightenment" boundary 2, volume 29 number 2 summer 2002, pp. 1-28.
  • "Modality, Normativity, and Intentionality" Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 63(3) pp. 587-609 N 01.