Robert Brandom - What is Philosophy?

What is the task of philosophical investigation? How is it different from the inquiries pursued in the natural sciences, the social sciences, and other humanistic disciplines?

Robert Brandom is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy. His books on the philosophy of language include Making It Explicit (Harvard, 1994) and Between Saying and Doing (Oxford, 2008). His books on German Idealism include A Spirit of Trust (Harvard, 2019), and Pragmatism and Idealism (Oxford, 2022).

[manuelemariani]

Brandom research is a great syntesis between classical pragmatism and a soft idea of RATIONALISM

[InsertPhilosophyHere]

As long as it is understood that rationality is not the only basis for the application of concepts.

[newtonswig]

The clearest articulation of Brandom’s metaphilosophy I’ve seen.

I want to dig deeper into two things:

His business of structurally rehistoricising- this enterprise of instilling understanding of the primacy of conceptual analysis into the literature of a field. Where does he think is ripe for depsychologisation? Are we at the philosophical end of history?

Secondly, how his dummetian, not-purely-logical conceptual analysis breaks or works with the categorical imperative. He doesn’t think there’s a magic map to right action, is he talking about CI, or just inferences in general. Does the self conscious applier of concepts not entitle themselves to at least a sense of their own moral rectitude?

Any Pitsburgians in the comments?