Robert Brandom

This paper aims to develop a new understanding of normativity based upon the priority of the ordinary. By relying upon diverse sociological and philosophical traditions, the paper seeks to emphasize the ordinary tacit assumptions which provide the basic structure of our experience of the world and its normative features. The general argument is that, whereas sociological traditions of social interactionism shed new light upon the “empirical fact of normativity”, ordinary language philosophy and pragmatism offer a theoretical account of normativity which is consistent with the picture of normativity which emerges out of these empirical descriptions. The paper synthesizes the main achievements of these traditions into a unified account of normativity.

Wittgenstein’s Investigations proposed an egalitarian view about language games, emphasizing their plurality (“language has no downtown”). Uses of words depend on the game one is playing, and may change when playing another. Furthermore, there is no privileged game dictating the rules for the others: games are as many as purposes. This view is pluralist and egalitarian, but it says little about the connection between meaning and use, and about how a set of rules is responsible for them in practice.
Brandom’s Making It Explicit attempted a straightforward answer to these questions, by developing Wittgensteinian insights: the primacy of social practice over meanings; the idea that meaning is use; the idea of rule–following to understand participation in social practices. Nonetheless, Brandom defended a non–Wittgensteinian conception of discursive practice: language has a “downtown”, the game of “giving and asking for reasons”. This is the idea of a normative structure of language, consisting of advancing claims and drawing inferences. By means of assertions, speakers undertake “commitments” that can be challenged/defended in terms of reasons (those successfully justified can gain “entitlement”). This game is not one among many: it is indispensable to the very idea of discursive practice.
In this paper, my aim will be that of exploring the main motivations and
implications of both perspectives.

1. McLuhanism is an approach to the integrative study of the modern human condition via the lens of technology. It takes its inspiration from the writings of Marshall McLuhan, but its ambitions reach beyond them, just as 20th century Western Marxism sought to go beyond the writings of Marx. Like Marxism, McLuhanism tells a story that is distinctively Western in origin, although global in eventual scope. McLuhanism enjoys over Marxism an advantage in the wealth of conceptual distinctiveness inherent in its object. In Marxism the primary object and lens of inquiry is capital, whose chief effect is the erasure of distinctiveness. The purpose of capital is to make all things equivalent, and this liquidation of use-values into the uniform medium of exchange-value is a primary object of Marxist critique. But capital is also the critical lens of Marxism, and this lens is by its very nature unsuited to the recovery of the conceptual distinctiveness of use-value. Thus Western Marxism's chronic failure to conceive of positive, emancipatory change. McLuhanism does not have this problem. Capital erases distinctiveness; technology does not. Capital is universal-indeed, the purpose of capital is to be universal. Technology, on the contrary, is indelibly particular. One may speak in general of "technology," but in truth there are only "technolog ies ." In contrast, one may speak only of "capital," as it is inherent in the concept of capital to be irreducibly singular. There is only one "capital," whose purpose is to erase all distinctions and make all things fungible. But "technology" is a category that comprises a whole cosmos of concepts, each of which is irreducibly distinctive and complex. Just as the project of Marxism is the exposition of the concept of capital, the project of McLuhanism is the exposition of the various interrelated concepts of technology. 2. The founding conceptual move of McLuhanism is the subsumption of the concept of "media" into the concept of "technology." This move places it in opposition to the mainstream of academic media studies, which tends to posit axiomatically a strong distinction between "media" technologies-i.e. technologies of communication or representation-and "non-media" technologies, and then directs its focus exclusively on the former. McLuhanism weakens this distinction. Whereas mainstream media studies draws a distinction between "media" and "non-media" technologies, McLuhanism situates that distinction within the category of technology. It thereby avoids one of the great conceptual pitfalls of mainstream media studies: viz., by positing a strong distinction between technologies of representation and communication and other technologies, and then focusing on the former at the expense of the latter, mainstream media studies puts itself in danger of taking for granted the concepts of representation and communication, of positing them as given when they are, on the contrary,

John E. Smith argued that there were almost as many pragmatisms as pragmatists. Almost all pragmatists criticized abstractive and reductive reasoning in the modern academy, but most entertained different visions of how and to what end academic reasoning should be repaired. Smith's vision was shaped by his strong preference for the classical pragmatisms of Peirce, Dewey, James and also Royce, whose differences contributed to the inner dynamism of Smith's pragmatism. Smith was far less impressed with the virtues of neo-pragmatists who rejected key tenets of the classical vision. My goal in this brief essay is to outline a partial list of these tenets, drawing on Smith's writings and those of a sample of recent pragmatists who share his commitment to the classical vision, such as Richard Bernstein, John Deely, and Doug Anderson. I restate the tenets in the terms of a pragmatic semeiotic, which applies Peirce's semeiotic to classical doctrines of habit-change and reparative inquiry. I conclude by adopting the tenets as signs of pragmatism's elemental beliefs. Consistent with Peirce's account of "original" beliefs, these are not discrete claims about the world or well-defined rational principles but a loose and dynamic network of habits. The habits grow, change, inter-mix or self-segregate through the run of intellectual and social history. They can be distinguished but only imprecisely, described but only vaguely, encountered per se only through their effects. Among these effects are sub-communities of pragmatic inquiry, sub-networks of habits, and existentially marked series of social actions and streams of written and spoken words: including context-specific, determinate claims about the world, about other claims, and about habits of inquiry like pragmatism. Among these claims are my way of stating of the tenets and my arguments about the history of pragmatism. Such claims are determinate, but the habits and tenets of pragmatism are not.

THIS IS PART II OF A TWO PART PUBLICATION

"Birbirinden başaralı denemelerden oluşan bu kitap, Hegel felsefesinin kalıcı gücüne tanıklık etmektedir. Aynı zamanda bu çalışma, son on yılın oldukça olumsuz politik koşulları altında çalışan, fakat yine de uluslararası bir bilim ve analiz düzeyine ulaşmayı başaran Türkiyeli bilim insanlarının oluşturduğu bir felsefi topluluğun filizlenmesini belgeliyor. Türkiye'deki okurlara Hegel felsefesi ve onun zengin ve çeşitlenmiş mirası üzerine bu derlemeyi sunmak benim için büyük bir mutluluk kaynağı." Şeyla Benhabib

Philosophers working in the wake of Sellars, such as Brandom and McDowell, think that there a fundamentally important distinction between ‘sapience’ and ‘sentience.’ Both sentience and sapience are ‘transcendental’ structures – they are posited to explain our cognitively significant experience, including (but not limited to) empirical knowledge – but they also must be adequately reflected in, or realized in, causal structures. Hence whatever structures and processes that we posit in the course of reflecting on the minimal necessary conditions for our cognitive capacities and incapacities must be correlated with structures and processes that are empirically confirmed and, to the extent possible, consistent with a scientific view of the world. Within this generally Sellarsian framework, I aim to criticize one key aspect of Sellars’s theory of perception concerning the role of sense-impressions (or sensations) as causally mediating our perceptual encounters with objects.  More specifically, I shall argue that Sellars was right to argue that we need to posit what he calls “sheer receptivity” in the interests of transcendental philosophy, but wrong to argue that sense-impressions were the best candidates to implement sheer receptivity in rerum natura. I shall then turn to recent work in the enactivist approach to philosophy of cognitive science, which emphasizes the structural coupling between sensorimotor skills and environmental affordances.  This structural coupling is a more promising candidate than sensations per se as the causal correlate of sheer receptivity.  I conclude by comparing the possibility of synthesizing inferentialism and enactivism with Huw Price’s “new bifurcation thesis”, and suggest that my approach is a more promising candidate for 21st-century Sellarsian pragmatism.

Andy Blunden presents a critical review of theories of Concepts in cognitive psychology, analytical philosophy, linguistics, conceptual change theory and other disciplines. The material convered has led many to abandon the idea of Concepts altogether, particularly those taking an interactionist approach. Blunden responds with an historical review focussing on the idealist philosophy of Hegel, its reception and transformation in the development of positive science and finally the cultural psychology of Lev Vygotsky. Blunden then proposes a approach to Concepts which draws on Activity Theory. Concepts are equally subjective and objective, units of consciousness and of the cultural formation of which one is a part. This continues Blunden's earlier work in "An Interdisaciplinary Theory of Activity" (Brill 2010).

This book is based on a series of lecture Rorty gave in 1996 in Girona as part of the Ferrater Mora Chair. It is Rorty's most comprehensive articulation of his take on pragmatism. The book was published in Spanish and Catalan, but Rorty did not publish it in English, although he clearly meant it as a coherent presentation of his version of pragmatism. It has a powerful forward by Robert Brandom. I wrote an epilogue that provides the bibliographical apparatus and attempts to explain why Rorty let this book go, so to say.

In his work, Robert Brandom presents an expressivist theory about logic. According to him, logic plays the expressive role of making explicit inferential relations implicit in our linguistic practices. Inferential relations constitute the content of our concepts. In our paper, we explore the thesis that Brandom's logical expressivism is an anti-realist theory about logic. Logical realists defend the independent existence of logical facts in relation to our cognitive and linguistic practices. In this view, logic truly describes the structure of reality, as it represents logical facts. By contrast, logical anti-realists do not commit to the independent existence of logical facts to understand the nature of logic. In contrast to a realist view, we show that Brandom's anti-realism renders a simple and economic ontology and also the foundation of a pragmatist alternative to examine the normativity of logic, the phenomenon of rival logics and the nature of our rationality.

The richness of Richard Rorty's text, Alcuni usi americani di Hegel, makes it impossible to discuss here all the issues he raises, although they certainly would merit attention. I will proceed in the following manner: first, I will comment on some of Rorty's explicit statements on
Hegel and in particular discuss the vexed question of Hegel's proper place in the history of philosophy; second, I will focus on one of the four American pragmatists Rorty relates to Hegel, namely Robert Brandom, and sketch some of the basic tenets of his philosophical program; and
third, I will compare Brandom's program with the Hegelian, analyzing both the similarities and the differences. It goes without saying that, given the complexities of the two philosophies, I will be unable to render justice to their subtleties and must limit myself to some general
reflections. These will make clear not only why Hegel would have to learn a lot from Brandom, but also why Brandom's enterprise cannot yet claim to be a contemporary version of Hegel's central ideas.

This is the 1996 Ferrater Mora Lecture that Rorty delivered at Girona, Spain. They were published in Catalan and Spanish. Some of the lecture were published in edited version in English. But the original manuscript had never appeared in full, as Rorty meant to organize and deliver it. Arguably this was the most mature presentation of his own version of pragmatism. The title in Spanish Read: Anti-Authoritarianism in Epistemology and Ethics. A Version. An important idea that Rorty carries through in these wonderful lecture is that we ought to see pragmatism as second reformation, as a reformation that extends to both ethics and epistemology. In the epilogue I reconstruct how these lectures related to his work from the nineties, and why he may have not pursued their publication in English (or alternatively, why he got so busy with his other work from the late 90s, in particular his lecture that became Achieving our Country.

Abstract:
This essay attempts to extend the exercise in normative pragmatics undertaken by Robert Brandom to include consideration of the logical relations between the practices of making of claims involving the use of the first-person-singular pronoun (‘I-talk’) and the making of claims involving the second-person-singular pronoun (‘You-talk’). The first part of the essay makes the case that the implicit response found in Brandom’s work affirms the pragmatic independence of I-talk from You-talk, such that it is possible to conceive of a discursive practice involving people using the first person-singular pronoun but not the second-person. The second part argues this response is mistaken, as there are reasons internal to Brandom’s own project that require pragmatic interdependence of I-talk and You-talk. The upshot of this exercise is normative pragmatics is thus that there can be no ‘I’ without a ‘You’.

The core of Robert Brandom's interpretation of Hegel in A Spirit of Trust is his detailed analysis of Hegel's dialectic of "recognition" (Anerkennung). I argue that, with this analysis, Brandom has effectively demonstrated the compelling character of Hegel's argument. However, I criticize Brandom's larger interpretation of Hegel for its failure to recognize the distinctive nature of what Hegel calls "the Freedom of Self-Consciousness." This, I argue, is closely aligned with the distinctive nature of reason (Vernunft), which is central to the experience of agency, but the weight of which is under-appreciated in Brandom's account of it.

Exploration of INTERSUBJECTIVITY is continued. Different kinds of if are differentiated and signs for its presence and effects are shown. The difference between it, subjectivity and objectivity are explored.
Intersubjectivity is crucial and universal for general everyday discourse in all cultures, sub-cultures, institutions, communities and socio-cultural practices such as religion, sport, etc or the so-called Manifest Image. It is essential for specialized areas, for example religion, sport and disciplines such as the humanities, arts, sciences, philosophy and all institutions.
It is a necessity for both cultural, social, interpersonal as well as intra-personal existence, emotions, attitudes, values and norms. But, it is not limited to human existence, life-worlds, realities and worlds, but also for animals and all organisms. Object Oriented Ontology would emphasize that is it not merely something anthropocentric and restricted to human existence and consciousness (and anthropocentric interpretations of and projections on other objects, non-human creatures and all organisms, as well as all objects.. In the case of the latter one would probably replace the notion of intersubjectivity with terms such as energy and other ways of action and interaction for example intra- and inter-atoms.)
In the Appendix is included work related to the above by others such as Sellars, Brandom (and his two images, Manifest and Scientific), Davidson, Dennett, Habermas, Nagel, etc.

El siglo XX será recordado por los grandes avances científicos y tecnológicos, la conquista del espacio, el uso masivo de las computadoras y las telecomunicaciones, el desarrollo de economías a escala mundial y por una notable expansión de la cultura y del mundo universitario; pero también, por las guerras mundiales, la amenaza de una aniquilación nuclear, los genocidios, la enorme desigualdad social, la crisis ecológica; los interrogantes y debates en torno a la genética y el futuro biológico de la humanidad y del planeta mismo. Todas estas realidades se reflejaron en la filosofía de ese siglo. Este libro hace un recorrido por las principales obras y autores que han marcado el pasado inmediato de la filosofía. Con un lenguaje accesible, se muestran las propuestas fundamentales que dieron pie al prestigio académico y social de estos pensadores, y se expone un modelo hermenéutico para enfrentarse a los textos clásicos.

In recent years, a renewed interest in Hegel’s Logic has led to important breakthroughs in our understanding of a number of Hegelian topics. Through a new interpretation of Hegel as a “logical constitutivist,” this essay seeks to challenge both Robert Pippin’s and John McDowell’s influential and important accounts of Hegel’s notion of freedom. Against Pippin’s claim that freedom in Hegel is a social and historical status “achieved” by certain living beings, I argue that Hegel’s logical account of freedom renders rational agency intelligible as a distinct form of life. Following an assessment of the status of the Logic as an account of intelligibility itself, I read Hegel’s logical concept of life as the primitive form of practical spontaneity and interpret his concept of knowing as the rational form of living self-maintenance. Yet in contrast to McDowell’s neo-Aristotelian critique of Pippin, I show that Hegel’s key idea of a “free genus” is more than a generic classification of free individuals: it seeks to account for the kind of living beings that collectively legislate their own normative constraints. In deducing the natural kind of specifically free beings (the “free genus”), Hegel achieves his logical ambition of demonstrating what must be true of both thought itself and certain living organisms for anything to be intelligible as what it is.

In "I that is We, We that is I", an international group of philosophers explore the many facets of Hegel’s formula which expresses the recognitive and social structures of human life. The book offers a guiding thread for the reconstruction of crucial motifs of contemporary thought such as the socio-ontological paradigm; the action-theoretical model in moral and social philosophy; the question of naturalism; and the reassessment of the relevance of work and power for our understanding of human life. This collection addresses the shortcomings of Kantian and constructivist normative approaches to social practices and practical rationality it involves. It sheds new light on Hegel’s take on metaphysics and puts into question some presuppositions of the post-metaphysical interpretative paradigm.
With essays by: Fred Neuhouser, Heikki Ikäheimo, Jean-François Kervégan, Luigi Ruggiu, Robert Stern, Arto Laitinen, Francesca Menegoni, Axel Honneth, Lucio Cortella, Luca Illetterati, Emmanuel Renault, Paolo Vinci, Italo Testa, Alfredo Ferrarin,  Franco Chiereghin, Leonardo Samonà, Geminello Preterossi

Robert Pippin’s work of recent years, culminating in his 2019 book Hegel’s Realm of Shadows: Logic as Metaphysics in The Science of Logic, has involved him undertaking two related tasks. First, in Hegel’s Realm of Shadows and contemporaneous texts of his, he launches a counter-offensive against recent efforts by particular others to situate G.W.F. Hegel in relation to permutations of materialism running from nineteenth-century Marxist dialectical materialism up through today. Second, Pippin wishes to rebut critics of his influential 1989 book Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness. Specifically, he seeks to defuse the objections of some according to which his earlier study is guilty of an excessive Kantianization of Hegel, namely, an operation of transforming Hegel’s absolute idealism, with its robust monist realism, into Immanuel Kant’s subjective idealism, with its dualist anti-realism. In this article, I will argue that Pippin both: one, fails to remain truly Hegelian in his repudiations of materialism and naturalism; as well as, two, continues to remain committed to an objectionable transcendental idealism of a Kantian (and Fichtean) type.

In this volume,‭ ‬volume‭ ‬6,‭ ‬I will deal with insight and understanding,‭ ‬meaning and communication and intersubjectivity.‭ (‬In an appendix I will include a number of‭ –‬isms,‭ ‬cognitive biases and fallacies that might interfere in,‭ ‬with and distort these things.‭)
The latter is pre-supposed by,‭ ‬present,‭ ‬necessary and operating in all four of these notions when they are employed as verbs.‭ ‬I hope and intend to employ these words and explore them without the need for ghost-in-the-machine like mysterious,‭ ‬mystical and mythical‭ ‘‬mental‭’ ‬processes and organs such as‭ ‘‬mind‭’ ‬and‭ ‘‬consciousness‭’ ‬but by means of different meanings,‭ ‬dimensions,‭ ‬levels of t notions of intersubjectivity.‭ ‬Intersubjectivity enfolds‭ (‬like a pregnant mother her foetus‭) ‬insight,‭ ‬understanding,‭ ‬meaning and communication.‭ ‬Intersubjectivity is the beginning,‭ ‬the ground and reason for and the end of all meanings or sense that human beings could have.‭ ‬I am not interested in all the details of insight,‭ ‬experience,‭ ‬understanding,‭  ‬meaning,‭ ‬concepts and ideas,‭ ‬dialogue,‭ ‬discourse,‭ ‬interaction,‭ ‬communication‭ (‬for example as speculated about by Habermas and his followers,‭ ‬Brandom et al‭)‬.‭ ‬etc‭  ‬but merely the fact that these things require,‭ ‬assume,‭ ‬presuppose‭ (‬different aspects,‭ ‬features,‭ ‬functions,‭ ‬processes,‭ ‬etc of‭) ‬intersubjectivity.‭  ‬For those who are so inclined they could execute experiments‭ (‬for example in the disciplines of philosophy,‭ ‬psychology,‭ ‬sociology,‭ ‬cognitive sciences,‭ ‬anthropology,‭ ‬etc‭) ‬to establish that what I state here is a fact and not merely speculate.‭ ‬I will leave speculation‭  ‬-‭ ‬about the activities and nature of the first,‭ ‬second and third person‭ (‬the public,‭ ‬etc‭) ‬participants in the activities and process of communication,‭ ‬the question of second and third contingencies,‭ ‬or Habermas’s interactionist cum dialogical intersubjectivity and/or Brandom’s discursive intersubjectivity,‭ ‬the insufficiency of the former’s coordination and the need for synthesis,‭ ‬modes of structuration and the temporal dimensions of communication,‭ ‬threefold semiotic or twofold semiological structuralist theories of signs,‭ ‬theories of individualist or collective learning,‭ ‬action-directing models cultural models,‭ ‬pre-supposed structural‭  ‬features of the social relationships that are involved in communication,‭  ‬the structure parameters of for example the process of communication embedded in an intersubjective context‭ (‬I would say all the following themselves‭  ‬are intersubjective‭)‬,‭ ‬as discursive practice,‭ ‬including discourse,‭ ‬argumentation,‭ ‬communication,‭ ‬communication exchange,‭ ‬linguistic communication,‭ ‬everyday communication,‭ ‬interaction,‭ ‬etc‭  ‬-‭ ‬those,‭ ‬especially Continentals and those influenced by them,‭ ‬who suffer from the need for metaphysical speculation and to ontologize in complex terms about the most simple and obvious notions.

The reason for these attitudes of mine towards mental things,‭ ‬processes,‭ ‬organs,‭ ‬etc is that I do not believe they exist,‭ ‬apart from being umbrella-notions that refer to a number of undefined and not yet conceptualized meanings.‭ ‬They have their origins in uneducated,‭ ‬uninformed redundant myths and folk psychology.‭ ‬Their usage date back to almost pre-historic times in the evolution of human thinking and psychology and are conceptual remainders and linguistic left overs‭  ‬of primitive flat earth socio-cultural attitudes and beliefs.

I further need to make four points concerning my approach in this volume and my approach to or understanding of philosophy,‭ ‬they manner or style in which I write,‭ ‬especially in this volume and how I employ and interpret the nature and one function of intersubjectivity,‭ ‬both in this volume and in general.‭ ‬The latter I present as a kind of hypothesis and conclusion.

Institutionalized and internalized,‭ ‬competence intersubjectivity contain many user-illusions and an imaginary or manifest image of reality,‭ ‬including of themselves‭ (‬Dennett and Sellars‭)‬,.‭ ‬This can be contrasted we a comprehension or comprehensive,‭ ‬understanding intersubjectivity.‭ ‬It is possible and perhaps even necessary to transform or replace the competence intersubjectivity to a comprehension or understanding‭ (‬scientific,‭ ‬Dennett and Sellars‭) ‬image of reality and themselves.Ethics and morality and studies of ethics and morality deal with the reality of competence intersubjectivity‭ (‬by means of socio-cultural practices that are derived from,‭ ‬based on an created by means of this restrictive,‭ ‬misleading,‭ ‬unreal,‭ ‬illusory,‭ ‬unrealistic intersubjectivity and the life-worlds associated with it‭)  ‬and human life-worlds constituted on the basis of and in terms of this intersubjectivity.‭ ‬This is why I am a nihilist,‭ ‬a libertarian,‭ ‬at least a minarchist or rather an anarchist and epistemologically a sceptic.


Kant’s‭ ‬things in themselves are similar‭ ‬to Dennett and Searle‭’‬s‭ ‬notions of manifest and scientific image.‭ ‬With my addition that we‭  ‬are socialized and internalize the competent,‭ ‬know how to do it,‭  ‬institutionalized manifest,‭ ‬everyday intersubjectivity,‭ ‬instead of the comprehension,‭ ‬insights and understanding knowing that,‭ ‬scientific intersubjectivity of all scientific disciplines.‭


This piece can be read as independent as comments on meta-ethics,‭ ‬or it can be read as a chapter in my Book‭ ‘‬Intersubjectivity‭ (‬continued‭)’‬,‭ ‬or it can be read as an introduction to my thoughts on philosophy and more specifically Intersubjectivity as‭ –


Determining the nature of‭  ‬philosophy


Determining the nature of the subject-matter of philosophy,‭ ‬sociology,‭ ‬social psychology,‭ ‬aspects of cognitive sciences,‭ ‬ethics,‭ ‬epistemology,‭ ‬etc,


Determining the nature of philosophical methodology and approaches.

Reasons why I have refrained from reflecting and writing on ethics and morality‭ ‬-‭

a‭)‬  The intersubjectivity that are institutionalized,‭ ‬socialized and internalize and therefore being employed to constitute reality,‭ ‬life-worlds,‭ ‬selves,‭ ‬discourses and socio-cultural practices,‭ ‬including specialized disciplines,‭ ‬eg philosophy,‭ ‬is that of‭  ‬Kantian things-for-us or Searle‭’ ‬and Dennett’s notion of manifest,‭ ‬imaginary,‭ ‬competent or know-how,‭ ‬knowing-how-to images.‭ ‬This kind of intersubjectivity underlies human morality and ethics,‭ ‬as well as approaches of philosophers to these and other branches of philosophy.

‭ ‬b‭) ‬How philosophers exist and how they live,‭ ‬their attitudes and beliefs,‭ ‬are very different from the theories of human existence,‭ ‬consciousness,‭ ‬selves,‭ ‬ethics,‭ ‬morality,‭ ‬epistemology,‭ ‬ontology,‭ ‬metaphysics,‭ ‬etc they advocate or express in and as their theories.‭ ‬Philosophers have their own private ways or personal styles of im/morality and being a-ethical while they advocate theories of ethics‭ (‬and other branches of philosophy‭) ‬that are completely different from their real attitudes and beliefs.

c‭) ‬As far as institutionalized and lived ethics and morality go I am a nihilist,‭ ‬an anarchist,‭ ‬or at least a minarchist,‭ ‬a Pyrrhonist,‭ ‬or at least a Humean or Kantian sceptic if not a fallibilist.

A suggestion before I paste the usual,‭ ‬contemporary encyclopaedic notions of ethics as a branch of philosophy and present notions of the‭ ‘‬division‭’ ‬of the subject and approaches to ethics and meta-ethics.‭

When a compatibilist says free will and determinism are compatible,‭ ‬and critics say they are mistaken‭ – ‬see below‭ – ‬they talk about specific situations,‭ ‬while those who points out that there do exists some kinds of determinisms after al,‭ ‬the latter take a more general,‭ ‬big picture view and make a statement on a greater or higher level of generality or generalization.

One feature of Sellars’s ‘philosophical’ semantics (EAE ¶¶40, 67) concerns ‘synthetic necessary truths’ (SM 2:53, 3:18–19), a direct successor to C. I. Lewis’s (MWO, 1929: 227–9, 254–8) relativised pragmatic a priori. Following Reichenbach, Lewis and Parrini, I argue (briefly) that the relativised synthetic a priori required for natural science cannot be merely linguistic (§3). I then argue in detail that the relevant, relativised synthetic a priori cannot be merely meta-linguistic (§§4–7). So doing identifies the key distinction between empiricism and pragmatism; the role of that distinction in contrasting Lewis’s robust pragmatic realism in MWO (1929) to his empiricist relapse in AKV (1946); the key contrast between the robust pragmatic realism of Classical American pragmatism and meta-linguistically inclined neo-pragmatism; and shows that Brandom’s (2015) inferentialist semantics is neo-pragmatist, not pragmatically realist; and that Sellars developed his philosophical semantics on behalf of robust pragmatic realism. Unlike Brandom, Sellars made his way back to robustly realist classical pragmatism by attending closely to Carnap’s use of his formal semantics and its methodological links to Carnap’s explication of conceptual ‘explication’. Carnap’s explication of ‘explication’ reconnects to Lewis’s pragmatic realist semantics in MWO. (Draft: 07.11.15)

I suggest that we can read Marx in the light of recent analytic, neo-Hegelian thought. I summarize the Pittsburgh School philosophers' claims about the myth of the given, the claim that human experience is conceptual all the way out, and that we live in a space of reasons. I show how Hegel has been read in those terms, and then apply that reading of Hegel to Marx's argument that capital is akin to what Hegel called Geist, or spirit. We can understand capitalism as a space of reasons that is contradictory: while the space of reasons is supposed to make human freedom possible, our space of reasons makes freedom impossible. Reading Marx in this way is helpful, because it avoids the flaws of analytical Marxism, existentialism and structuralism. However, it raises a large problem of its own: Can the theory of the space of reasons be applied to a society that is not free of alienation? I argue that it can, but only in ways that would not satisfy the analytic neo-Hegelians themselves.

The purpose of the first part of this paper is to examine the major turning point events that transformed the attitude of analytic philosophers towards metaphysical discourse. We will focus on one such turning point, the modal revolution, based on the resources of possible world semantics, developed by Kripke (who devised suitable models for modal logic) and by philosophers such as Lewis and Plantinga (who offered influential metaphysical interpretations of those models). We shall see how the modal revolution, by bringing an unprecedented change in the way in which modal notions were understood by analytic philosophers, was central to the revival of metaphysics in contemporary philosophy. Yet, analytic philosophers encountered serious obstacles in their attempt to understand the ontological and epistemological foundations and implications of one of the most basic notions of the modal revolution, that of a possible world. In the second part of the paper, it will be argued that, surprisingly enough, the work of the pre-Kripkean " middle " analytic philosopher Wilfrid Sellars, especially as interpreted and reconstructed by Robert Brandom, can perhaps throw light on the semantic, epistemic and ontological dimension of possible world talk. Sellars does this mainly through 1) (what Brandom calls) the " Kant-Sellars thesis about modality " , 2) his understanding of modal discourse as non-descriptive, expressive, categorial and " metaliguistic " , and 3) his nominalism about abstract entities. Thus, it will be suggested that the implications of this Sellars-inspired position are such that make it an unexpectedly relevant and novel contribution to contemporary debates in analytic metaphysics.

Robert Pippin’s work of recent years, culminating in his 2019 book Hegel’s Realm of Shadows: Logic as Metaphysics in The Science of Logic, has involved him undertaking two related tasks. First, in Hegel’s Realm of Shadows and contemporaneous texts of his, he launches a counter-offensive against recent efforts by particular others to situate G.W.F. Hegel in relation to permutations of materialism running from nineteenth-century Marxist dialectical materialism up through today. Second, Pippin wishes to rebut critics of his influential 1989 book Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness. Specifically, he seeks to defuse the objections of some according to which his earlier study is guilty of an excessive Kantianization of Hegel, namely, an operation of transforming Hegel’s absolute idealism, with its robust monist realism, into Immanuel Kant’s subjective idealism, with its dualist anti-realism. In this article, I will argue that Pippin both: one, fails to remain truly Hegelian in his repudiations of materialism and naturalism; as well as, two, continues to remain committed to an objectionable transcendental idealism of a Kantian (and Fichtean) type.

CONTENTS (below; Note: Eric and I received permission from Jeff Sicha of Ridgeview Publishing Ltd. to put the full pdf of this book up online):
Willem deVries: 'Kant, Rosenberg, and the Mirror of Philosophy'
David Landy:  'The Premise That Even Hume Must Accept'
William G. Lycan:  'Rosenberg on Proper Names'
Douglas Long:  'Why Life is Necessary for Mind: The Significance of Animate Behavior'
Dorit Bar-On and Mitchell Green: 'Lionspeak: Communication, Expression, and Meaning'
David Rosenthal:  'The Mind and Its Expression'
Jeffrey Sicha:  'The Manifest Image: the Sensory and the Mental'
Bruce Aune:  'Rosenberg on Knowing'
Joseph C. Pitt  'Sellarsian Antifoundationalism and Scientific Realism'
Matthew Chrisman: 'The Aim of Belief and the Goal of Truth: Reflections on Rosenberg'
James O'Shea:  'Conceptual Thinking and Nonconceptual Content: A Sellarsian Divide'
Anton Koch:  'Persons as Mirroring the World'
Eric M. Rubenstein:  'Form and Content, Substance and Stuff'
Ralf Stoecker:  'On Being a Realist About Death'
William G. Lycan:  'Biographical Remarks on Jay F. Rosenberg'
Scholarly Publications of Jay F. Rosenberg

Introductory essay to the collection "I that is We, We that is I" (ed. by Italo Testa and Luigi Ruggiu, Brill Books, 2016). In this book an international group of philosophers explore the many facets of Hegel’s formula which expresses the recognitive and social structures of human life. The book offers a guiding thread for the reconstruction of crucial motifs of contemporary thought such as the socio-ontological paradigm; the action-theoretical model in moral and social philosophy; the question of naturalism; and the reassessment of the relevance of work and power for our understanding of human life. This collection addresses the shortcomings of Kantian and constructivist normative approaches to social practices and practical rationality it involves. It sheds new light on Hegel’s take on metaphysics and puts into question some presuppositions of the post-metaphysical interpretative paradigm

The close connection often cited between Hegel and Wilfrid Sellars is not only said to lie in their common negative challenges to the “framework of givenness,” but also in the positive lesson drawn from these challenges. In particular, the critique of givenness is thought to lead to a conceptualist view of perceptual experience. In this essay, I challenge the common idea that Hegel’s critique of givenness provides specific support for a conceptualist view. The notion that Hegel, if anyone, is a conceptualist depends on faulty assumptions about the conceptual character of all language, including the indexical expressions Hegel discusses in “Sense-Certainty.” I first show that these assumptions are often imported into Hegel’s texts but are also out of keeping with his own systematic views of concepts and language. To avoid a merely verbal disagreement, however, I then explore the features of Sellarsian semantics needed to make a thorough conceptualism plausible. Sellars’ “picturing” theory is necessary to show how non-predicate terms (like indexicals) have meaning, but in order to put this feature of Sellars’ semantics in service of a conceptualist view, one must abandon the descriptive character of concepts that is a minimal feature of Hegelian thought.

Brandom. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019. pp. xiv + 836. In the last thirty years, there has been a remarkable renaissance of interest in Hegelian philosophy in the Anglophone world, and Robert Brandom has been one of the main reasons for it. His new book, the culmination of his long engagement with Hegel's Phenomenology, is supposed not only to show us the way forward in philosophy but also, he says, to cure many of our social ills. His reconstruction of Hegel's idealism is, as he says early on, 'a semantics with an edifying intent' that will make us 'better people' (p. 32). It will usher in a 'spirit of trust'. This is a tall order for a book on anybody, including one on Hegel. Brandom's book is an instance of a genre-'Here's what I in particular make of large parts of Hegel's book'-and, although scholarly, it ignores almost entirely all the other secondary literature on the topic. The real interlocutors of the book are Kant, Frege, Wittgenstein, Sellars, Davidson, a smor-gasbord of some of the major analytical philosophers of the twentieth century, but not other Hegel interpreters. Nonetheless, given the fact that Brandom's own account of the Phenomenology is much longer than the already fabulously long original book itself, this neglect of the secondary literature is probably overall a good thing. This is a big book in all the senses of the term. Brandom simply eschews the traditional neo-Platonist, neo-Aristotelian and neo-Spinozistic interpretations to argue instead that the emphasis on Geist is really about a kind of inferentialist semantics grounded in a norma-tive pragmatics, an expanded and refined version of the same position he has defended eloquently over the last few decades. This encompasses the Sellarsian idea that concepts are the kind of things that normatively mediate inferences (and are thus primarily not to be understood in representationalist terms) and that the semantics of these concepts themselves cannot be adequately comprehended unless we understand those inferences in pragmatic terms, that is, in terms of what we are doing when we do things like, to take a paradigmatic example, make judgments.  Mind, Vol. 0. 0. September 2019 ß Mind Association

Questo lavoro si propone di fornire un quadro critico-teorico sulle caratteristiche fondamentali dell’inferenzialismo semantico contemporaneo, la proposta di semantica filosofica che indaga il significato di un’espressione linguistica e il contenuto concettuale da essa veicolato mediante la nozione di inferenza materiale.
Il focus principale del mio lavoro di ricerca è la proposta teorica del filosofo statunitense Robert Brandom, presentata nel libro Making it Explicit, e finalizzata ad articolare in un complesso sistema filosofico la semantica inferenzialista e l’apparato pragmatico-normativo che descrive le nostre pratiche discorsive mediante il gioco linguistico fondamentale del “dare e chiedere ragioni”.
Nella prima parte di questo lavoro si offre una retrospettiva “Brandom-oriented” sulle basi fondanti dell’inferenzialismo contemporaneo, e si analizza il ruolo del pensiero di Gottlob Frege, Wilfrid Sellars e Michael Dummett, nella prospettiva generale di Brandom.
Nella seconda parte si analizzano le semantiche inferenzialiste del ruolo concettuale sviluppatesi negli anni Ottanta del Secolo scorso, e si differenzia il loro approccio “disposizionalista” da quello “normativista” presentato dal nostro autore
Nella terza parte viene presentata nel dettaglio la teoria di Brandom. Il primo stadio è un’analisi metodologica sul “neopragmatismo” di Brandom e sulle affinità e divergenze con l’anti-rappresentazionalismo di Richard Rorty. Il secondo stadio riguarda la pragmatica-normativa e la descrizione del gioco linguistico fondamentale del “dare e chiedere ragioni” e del suo nucleo teorico: lo scorekeeping deontico. Il terzo stadio esamina la semantica inferenzialista costruita intorno al primitivo semantico dell’inferenza materiale, e il quarto offre una prospettiva generale sull’approccio inferenzialista e deflazionista alla dimensione rappresentazionale, e ai concetti di “verità” e “riferimento”.
Dall’analisi della proposta di Brandom emergono due problemi centrali nella semantica inferenzialista: il “problema dello standard semantico” e il “problema dell’oggettività”.
Questi due problemi vengono analizzati nella quarta parte del mio lavoro, insieme alle altre sfide chiave dell’inferenzialismo: la composizionalità del linguaggio e del pensiero, i problemi legati al “grasp of concepts” e alle inferenze costitutive, e il problema esternista dei contenuti concettuali oggettivi.
Sempre in questa sezione si prova ad avanzare una soluzione ipotetica al “problema dello standard semantico”, cercando di ampliare la teoria di Brandom con degli elementi che non compaiono nella sua proposta: l’esistenza degli esperti nella comunità e il ruolo normativo dei processi comportamentali di deferenza semantica.
Nelle conclusioni vengono avanzate alcune riflessioni sulla possibilità (o meno) di poter abbracciare in toto la proposta inferenzialista.

The essay examines the idea of expressivism as it is presented and defended in the work of Robert Brandom and Charles Taylor. Two features of what we ordinarily mean by the term ‘expression’ are distinguished, one of which provides an intuitive basis for understanding Brandom’s expressivist program, the other of which provides an interpretive key for understanding Taylor’s version of expressivism. After looking briefly at the main tenets of these expressivisms, the essay concludes by considering their relation to Romanticism on the one hand, and to the Enlightenment project (and Brandom’s proposed renewal of it) on the other.

This book takes as its guiding thread the statement from Hegel's lectures on the philosophy of spirit of 1805-06, that «cognition is recognition[Erkennen ist Anerkennen]». The gnoseological importance of this solution can be comprehended only if we reconstruct the evolution of Hegel's thought in that span of time in which he most directly tackles the issue of skepsis: that is, from 1797 - the beginning of his Frankfurt period - when he began to occupy himself with gnoseological questions, until the end of his stay in Jena, which begins in 1801 and concludes in 1807 with the writing of the Phenomenology. In the Jena period Hegel developed an epistemological strategy that can be summarized in the following theses: 1. Hegel naturalizes the epistemological questions; 2. to do so he critiques foundationalism qua theory of empirical cognition; 3. and qua theory of epistemic justification; 4. the critique of foundationalism is linked to a critique of the corresponding representationalistic theory of perception, with respect to which Hegel delineates an alternative - pragmatic-interactional - model; 5. this, in turn, is linked to a critique of the monological theories of self-consciousness and to the development of a model - itself practical-interactional - of the rise of self-conscious knowing; 6. Hegel makes use of the tropes of ancient skepticism on one hand to critique the epistemological position responsible for modern skepsis, and on the other to define, in a positive sense, the holistic and recognitive structure of cognition and of rationality, through the tropes of the circle and of the relation; 7. Hegel synthesizes these epistemological views in a theory of cognition qua recognition; 8. Hegel roots this theory in his Naturphilosophie, thus formulating a conception that accounts for the relation between natural recognition and spiritual recognition of a normative-conceptual type. The analysis of the development of the Hegelian theory of cognition - worked out in the first part of my study - is dealt with in the context of a reconstruction of the historico-argumentative constellation within which it matured. The constellation of importance for our analysis is represented by the skeptical crisis - triggered by authors such as Schulze, Maimon and Platner - that invested the post-Kantian galaxy, within which the idealist solutions to the problem of cognition matured. Through the analysis of journals and authors with whom Hegel came directly or indirectly into contact - from Platner to Reinhold, Jacobi, Fichte and Schelling, to Hölderlin and Sinclair, concluding with Zeender, Krug, Bouterwek and Werneburg, and among the journals Fülleborn's Beiträge and Niethammer's Journal in particular - it is possible to map the various solutions proposed for the skeptical problem and see how it is in relation to this problem that the conceptions of self-consciousness evolve and the very concept of "interpersonality" - "intersubjectivity" - emerges for the first time. At the same time, pursuing my objective of broadening the investigation of the phenomenon of recognition, which in my view is not reducible to the field of practical philosophy, I propose a fresh reconstruction of the lexical and conceptual evolution of the various terms - Erkennen, Wiedererkennen, Recognition, Anerkennen - through which the various modalities of the phenomenon of recognition were indicated in the philosophical tradition to which Hegel refers: recognition of objects as perceptive reidentification; reminiscence on the level of theory of memory; recognition of subjects as self-recognition (apperception) and attribution to others of intentionality; logical recognition as recognition of the validity of a proposition; moral recognition, where "recognizing" generally means approving, accepting (more specifically, someone may be "recognized" as an autonomous subject and as a unique, genuine individuality). I focus in particular on the theory of memory as «recognitio» in Wolff and in his school, on the conception of «reconnaissance» in Bonnet, on Kantian «Recognition» and on the theory of «Anerkennen» in Ernst Platner. This investigation serves, on the one hand, to show how the phenomenon of recognition is central for a comprehension of the structure both of the lower and of the higher cognitive faculties. This ought to allow us to understand in what sense Hegel, taking intersubjective recognition as his leading phenomenon, attempts to reunite the various meanings of recognition within a theory of cognition on the basis of which «cognition is recognition». On the other hand, my conceptual and lexicographic investigation also serves to bring to light - in a new way with respect to the studies on Anerkennung - a hitherto unknown problematic constellation and the input of certain authors, such as Werneburg and Platner, whose conceptions may have influenced Hegel's approach. The second part of my study - a reconstruction of the pre-phenomenological Jena writings dealing with «Anerkennung» - dwells on the theme of the notion of natural recognition, whose centrality for the Hegelian conception of recognition has not yet been adequately grasped. This reconstruction of the theory of natural recognition gives due weight to the influence of Schelling on Hegel's understanding of «Anerkennung» - while the critical literature has generally concentrated on Fichte. Analyzing the conception of the animal organism developed in particular in the lectures on the philosophy of nature of 1803-04 brings to light how Hegel already individuates the recognitive phenomenon at the level of sexual reproduction: it is from here that he posits the natural prerequisites for the development of consciousness of self. The category of natural recognition will present itself anew in Hegel's analysis of the human world in the philosophy of spirit, where it concerns sexual love, reproduction and child raising: natural recognition is, then, that on the basis of which Hegel develops his theory that cognition is recognition. Recognition, as a «middle» of spirit, is a cognitive phenomenon that is primitive with respect to linguistically structured human intersubjectivity; it is, properly, that cognitive structure which is necessarily presupposed by a self-conscious subjectivity that expresses itself linguistically: linguistic intersubjectivity expresses various modes of recognition, but not every form of recognition is linguistic. The evolutional theory of cognition as recognition is in fact designed to show how increasingly complex recognitive relations emerge from a basic level of natural interactions to take on a linguistically mediated and universal structure. With the notion of spiritual recognition Hegel indicates just that ensemble of normative relations that constitute the infrastructure of action and thus mediate the formation of socially articulated self-conscious knowing of self. In the lectures on the philosophy of spirit of 1803-04 and of 1805-06 Hegel thus reconstructs the recognitive structure of the social institutions of right, of labor, and of exchange, showing that, within a politically structured community, dyadic (I-you) interactions are mediated by the universal viewpoint of the "we" incarnated in institutions that can be recognized by citizens as their own and by which citizens can be recognized.

In "Psychopower and Ordinary Madness" my ambition, as it relates to Bernard Stiegler's recent literature, was twofold: 1) critiquing Stiegler's work on exosomatization and artefactual posthumanism-or, more specifically, nonhumanism-to problematize approaches to media archaeology that rely upon technical exteriorization; 2) challenging how Stiegler engages with Giuseppe Longo and Francis Bailly's conception of negative entropy. These efforts were directed by a prevalent techno-cultural qualifier: the rise of Synthetic Intelligence (including neural nets, deep learning, predictive processing and Bayesian models of cognition). This paper continues this project but first directs a critical analytic lens at the Derridean practice of the ontologization of grammatization from which Stiegler emerges while also distinguishing how metalanguages operate in relation to object-oriented environmental interaction by way of inferentialism. Stalking continental (Kapp, Simondon, Leroi-Gourhan, etc.) and analytic traditions (e.g., Carnap, Chalmers, Clark, Sutton, Novaes, etc.), we move from artefacts to AI and Predictive Processing so as to link theories related to technicity with philosophy of mind. Simultaneously drawing forth Robert Brandom's conceptualization of the roles that commitments play in retrospectively reconstructing the social experiences that lead to our endorsement(s) of norms, we compliment this account with Reza Negarestani's deprivatized account of intelligence while analyzing the equipollent role between language and media (both digital and analog).

Eine breite Mehrheit der gegenwärtigen anglo-amerikanischen Philosophen bekennt sich zur analytischen Philosophie und zu einem Naturalismus. So vage diese Benennungen auch sein mögen, sie bezeichnen zumeist eine bestimmte mehr implizite epistemisch-methodische und eine bestimmte ebenfalls implizite ontologische Festlegung, die eng mit der Ansicht zusammenhängen, dass vornehmlich die Naturwissenschaft als das Paradigma gelungener menschlicher Erkenntnis gilt. Es ist in diesem Zusammenhang kein Geheimnis, dass die Gründungsväter der modernen analytischen Philosophie sich klar gegen Hegels philosophische Grundposition wenden.

Ebenso ist es jedoch auch kein Geheimnis, dass sich in jüngerer Zeit immer mehr Zweifel an der Fruchtbarkeit des Programms des Logischen Empirismus und seiner nachfolgenden Positionen mehren. Ohne Zweifel hat sich seit den 1950er Jahren des letzten Jahrhunderts ein sehr grundlegender Wandel in der analytischen Tradition vollzogen, der zugleich auch eine erneute vorsichtige Hegel-Rezeption in konstruktiv-systematischer, und nicht mehr nur historisch-polemischer Hinsicht in einigen Kreisen jener Strömung ermöglicht hat.Wir begegnen damit dem nun nicht mehr gänzlich ungewöhnlichen Phänomen, dass sich nicht nur 'kontinentale Philosophen', sondern zunehmend auch 'analytische' Zunftgenossen in Fragen der Epistemologie produktiv ohne Angst – und sogar ohne Abscheu – vorsichtig Hegel zuwenden

Pointiert zugespitzt soll die These vertreten werden, dass einerseits eine methodische Verkürzung der Vernunft auf den Verstand und in ontischer Hinsicht eine Verkürzung des Begriffs der Realität auf eine 'partikularistisch' verstandene Natur sowie eine damit einhergehende stark dualistische Entgegensetzung von Einzelheit der Natur und Allgemeinheit des Geistes die Ursachen für die zu skizzierenden Probleme des Naturalismus sind.


Es soll somit igezeigt werde, dass nicht unbedingt immer der aktive Rückgriff auf Hegel selbst, aber doch mehr und mehr hegelsche Motive und Einsichten in der epistemischen Debatte der analytischen Philosophie um sich greifen: Hegels Analyse der Größe und Grenzen des Empirismus zeigen eine erstaunliche Aktualität. Doch hat die derzeitige Annäherung an Hegel seine deutlichen Grenzen, auf die ebenfalls hingewiesen wird. Es kann maximal von einer vorsichtigen Annäherung, aber nicht von einer Rückkehr zu Hegel gesprochen werden, wie abschließend festzuhalten sein wird.

Betrachten wird zunächst (1) die epistemische und ontische Startaufstellung in der Konstitutionsphase der analytischen Philosophie, um sodann (2) einen knappen Blick auf drei Motive der hegelschen Auseinandersetzung mit dem Empirismus und der kritischen Philosophie zu werfen, so dass (3) abschließend einige wesentliche Veränderungen in der Tradition der analytischen Philosophie skizziert werden können, die ein Abrücken von den sehr stark anti-hegelschen Intuitionen der ersten Phase darstellen.