Robert Brandom’s Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing and Discursive Commitment is one of the most significant, talked about and daunting books published in philosophy in recent years. Featuring specially-commissioned chapters by leading international philosophers with replies by Brandom himself, Reading Brandom clarifies, critically appraises and furthers understanding of Brandom’s important book.
Divided into four parts - ‘Normative Pragmatics’; ‘The Challenge of Inferentialism’; ‘Inferentialist Semantics’; and ‘Brandom’s Replies’, Reading Brandom covers the following key aspects of Brandom’s work:
- inferentialism vs. representationalism
- normativity in philosophy of language and mind
- pragmatics and the centrality of asserting
- language entries and exits
- meaning and truth
- semantic deflationism and logical locutions.
Essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy of language and mind, Reading Brandom is also an excellent companion volume to Reading McDowell: On Mind and World, also published by Routledge.
'Many philosophers find Brandom’s Making It Explicit to be an impossibly indispensable book: too original, insightful and provocative to ignore, but too massive, wide-ranging, detailed and revisionist to assimilate in real time. Reading Brandom significantly lowers the barrier to serious philosophical engagement with this indisputably important work. Its well-chosen essays with Brandom’s replies bring clarity and focus to the central issues raised by his project.' – Joseph Rouse, Wesleyan University, USA
'Reading Brandom constitutes a thorough discussion of Brandom's work, bringing out the different aspects and tensions in Making it Explicit. Brandom's replies to his critics shed new light on his work and move the discussion an important step forward.' – Michael Esfeld, University of Lausanne, Switzerland
'Like other great philosophers, Brandom builds conceptual resources whose significance transcends his applications of them, and whose fertility and rigor will leave a lasting mark on how philosophy is done. This excellent collection of essays and replies is an invaluable resource for anyone who wishes to master Brandom's work. Regardless of one’s area of specialization, there is profit in mastering it.' – Rick Grush, University of California, San Diego, USA
'Anyone interested in Robert Brandom's influential magnum opus in the philosophy of language, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Harvard, 1994), will want to own this fine collection of new critical essays on Brandom's work by prominent philosophers along with clarifying replies by Brandom. ... Bernhard Weiss and Jeremy Wanderer have assembled an outstanding group of philosophers to probe and criticize or amend and extend Brandom's project.' – James R. O'Shea, University College Dublin, Ireland, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
