Robert Boyce Brandom (; born March 13, 1950) is an American philosopher who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. He works primarily in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and philosophical logic, and his academic output manifests both systematic and historical interests in these topics. His work has presented "arguably the first fully systematic and technically rigorous attempt to explain the meaning of linguistic items in terms of their socially norm-governed use ("meaning as use", to cite the Wittgensteinian slogan), thereby also giving a non-representationalist account of the intentionality of thought and the rationality of action as well."

Brandom is broadly considered to be part of the American pragmatist tradition in philosophy. In 2003 he won the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award.

Education

Brandom earned his BA in 1972 from Yale University and his PhD in 1977 from Princeton University, under Richard Rorty and David Kellogg Lewis.

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). Brandom delivered the 2006 John Locke lectures at Oxford University, which Oxford University Press published under the title Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism (2008). In 2019 he published A Spirit of Trust, a book about Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.

Books

  • The Logic of Inconsistency, with Nicholas Rescher. Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1980.
  • Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment, Harvard University Press (Cambridge) 1994.
  • Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, by Wilfrid Sellars, Robert B. Brandom (ed.) Harvard University Press, 1997. With an introduction by Richard Rorty and Study Guide by Robert Brandom
  • 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 Publishers, Oxford, July 2000
  • Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism, Harvard University Press, 2000 (paperback 2001), 230 pp. 
  • Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality, Harvard University Press, 2002.
  • In the Space of Reasons: Selected Essays of Wilfrid Sellars, edited with an introduction by Kevin Scharp and Robert Brandom. Harvard University Press, 2007.
  • Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism, Oxford University Press, 2008.
  • Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas, Harvard University Belknap Press, 2009.
  • Perspectives on Pragmatism: Classical, Recent, & Contemporary, Harvard University Press, 2011.
  • From Empiricism to Expressivism: Brandom Reads Sellars, Harvard University Press, 2015
  • Wiedererinnerter Idealismus, Suhrkamp Verlag, 2015 (in German)
  • A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology, Harvard University Press, 2019.
  • Pragmatism and Idealism: Rorty and Hegel on Reason and Representation, Oxford University Press, 2023.
  • Reasons for Logic, Logic for Reasons: Pragmatics, Semantics, and Conceptual Roles, with Ulf Hlobil. Routledge, 2025.

References

Further reading

  • Bernd Prien and David P. Schweikard (eds.), Robert Brandom: Analytic Pragmatist, Ontos, 2008, 194pp., . [Collection of essays with Brandom's responses].
  • Jeremy Wanderer, Robert Brandom, Acumen Publishing (UK); McGill-Queens University Press (US), 2008, 256 pp. 256 . [Critical introduction].
  • Bernhard Weiss and Jeremy Wanderer (eds.), Reading Brandom: On Making It Explicit, Routledge 2010, 371 pp, [Collection of essays—including contributions by Gibbard, Dennett, Taylor, McDowell, Dummett, Fodor and Lepore and Wright—with Brandom's responses].
  • Ronald Loeffler, Brandom, Polity Press, 2017, 240 pp. . [Critical introduction].
  • Home page
  • 2005-2006 John Locke Lectures
  • Interview 1999
  • Presentation in Sydney 2005
  • 2010 interview with Brandom about pragmatism: Part 1, Part 2.
  • Interview at 3AM Magazine
  • 2014 draft of A Spirit of Trust