Description
Book SynopsisIn 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 provi
Trade ReviewBrandom otherwise constructs a careful and insightful conversation between Rorty and Hegel that is likely to be fecund for readers of either thinker. * Susan Dieleman, Metascience *
Table of ContentsPreface Lecture 1: Pragmatism as Completing the Enlightenment: Reason Against Representation Lecture 2: Recognition and Recollection: The Social and Historical Dimensions of Reason Afterword
