February 20, 2014 at about 2:20 P.M. computer #14 at NYPL, Morningside Heights branch, was frozen, as I was using it, and the mouse became inoperative. The librarian, Ms. Acevedo, was unable to help and noticed that this "paralysis" was highly unusual, as is the frequency with which the printer is deprived of toner (or paper) when I seek to make use of it. Curiously, the same two persons are often seen making many copies immediately before I make use of these devices. There have been several hacks into these public library computers from New Jersey government offices, allegedly. I am sure that this is merely a coincidence.
Has Staci Berger of New Jersey's Housing Authority visited my sites? Has Ms. Berger read any of my writings? Is Ms. Berger a friend of Diana Lisa Riccioli? Alicia Mucci? Barbara Buono? Stuart Rabner? Has Ms. Berger been a source for The New Republic's recent attacks against Mr. Christie? Is the TNR piece on Christie Solomon Dwek's revenge? Is Ms. Berger also "Jennifer Shuessler"? "Jill Ketchum"? ("Marilyn Straus Was Right!" and "Censorship and Cruelty in New Jersey.")
I have been told that New York Library cards now expire, automatically, after three years. I have no idea when my card will expire -- or whether I will be given a hard time about renewing it -- in order to prevent me from using public computers. I will try to renew my card if it does expire. If I am denied the use of the library, then you may expect me to continue writing at public Internet cafes as well as with private computers. ("How censorship works in America.")
There are three sections to this essay. I have experienced and anticipate obstructions in efforts to type or post this work. As a result -- since I will not be able to return to the public library until several days from now -- it may be wise to post the first two parts of the text now, leaving the remaining section for when I can return to this facility. I am often prevented from posting new essays from my home. Additional sources and revisions may be added to the work in the days and weeks ahead. I will certainly try to post the full text from my home while fully anticipating that this may be impossible. The size of the type may be altered and other deformations of the text are likely. I will do my best to correct inserted "errors" whenever possible.
The following are the primary sources for this review essay:
Robert Brandom, Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 237 pages.
Reviewed at Mark Okrent, Bates College, Notre Dame Philosophy Reviews.
"Inferential Man," Interview of Robert Brandom by Jeffrey J. Williams, http://www.projectmuse.jhu.edu
The themes that I focus on in commenting on Professor Brandom's book are also found, in very different discussions, in these works:
Alain Badiou, Second Manifesto For Philosophy (London: Polity, 2011).
Alain Badiou, Conditions (London: Continuum, 2008).
John Patrick Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism, and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). (Useful on Brandom's sources in the pragmatist tradition, especially the final chapter on Richard Rorty.)
Bryan Magee, Schopenhauer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983).
Bryan Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher: A Journey Through Western Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1997).
Colin McGinn, The Problem of Consciousness (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981).
Colin McGinn, The Making of a Philosopher: My Journey Through Twentieth Century Philosophy (London: Houghton-Mifflin, 2002).
A.W. Moore, The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Ark, 1962).
Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Penguin, 1992).
Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981).
Robert Nozick, Socratic Puzzles (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).
Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays: 1972-1980 (Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1982).
Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
John Russon, Human Experience: Philosophy, Neurosis, and the Elements of Everyday Life (New York: SUNY, 2003).
Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest For the Ultimate Nature of Reality (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014).
Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985).
Bernard Williams, Essays and Reviews: 1959-2002 (Oxford & Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).
"I think philosophy is about what it means to be a human being. ... how we are creatures who give and ask for reasons, which is something I understand under the heading of inference."
-- Robert Brandom in conversation with Jeffrey J. Williams.
I.
There are many disturbing reports of decline in enrollment in humanities programs, especially when it comes to philosophy majors in American colleges and universities. Lack of popularity has caused a number of schools to shut down their philosophy departments, offering fewer courses in the subject to their students, while making the acquisition by young people of the necessary training in philosophy that would allow for graduate study virtually impossible.
I have noted elsewhere that there are many expressions of concern by academics and public officials about declining educational achievement among American students graduating -- even from so-called elite liberal arts colleges and university programs -- by comparison with their counterparts in other countries.
Philosophy is not a required subject for American high school students. Sadly, philosophy is also not a subject that is frequently chosen as an elective by most students and/or graduates, not even (as I say) by graduates of the nation's primary liberal arts schools who, presumably, are pursuing related studies in literature, history, science and mathematics, politics, or social studies.
As a result of this absence of basic knowledge of logic and epistemology on the part of most young Americans, avoidable errors in thinking have become more common not only in academic contexts, but also in numerous professional settings. When these errors are combined with declining language skills and literacy -- young people read and write less well than they did even twenty years ago -- the situation becomes highly worrisome for America's future.
A large number of persons whose undergraduate education is in the humanities eventually work for the federal government. This is not a comforting thought. Paradoxically, it is also true that the number of distinguished, even world-level philosophers and logicians at universities and think-tanks in the United States far exceeds the number found in any other nation, including China with its greater population.
America is blessed with more intellectual talent for this subject, philosophy (and many others), than any other nation that I can think of in the world. The waste or loss of great gifts by young people, through lack of opportunity for their development and expression, can only be called tragic.
Americans are so rich in human genius that we throw away minds by the millions not realizing how desperately we may need those minds some day.
I wish to focus in this brief comment, primarily, on one chapter of Brandom's book and the foundations for the discussion in that section of his wonderful and unified collection of essays.
Professor Robert Brandom deserves to be included with the most distinguished American philosophers, past and present, such as Richard Rorty (with whom Brandom studied, eventually editing a collection of essays examining Rorty's work); Brand Blanschard, with whom Brandom also studied at Yale University, and whose Rationalism seems to have remained a lasting influence; also Wilfrid Sellars and other colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh, like John McDowell and Nicholas Rescher.
I will capitalize the word "Rationalism" to designate the specific philosophical position associated with a priori knowledge and, historically, with the Cartesian revolution in Western thought.
The Center For the Philosophy of Science and the Department of Philosophy at Pittsburgh have established themselves as comparable to Oxbridge, Harvard, Princeton, or the Soborne in terms of the quality of achievement by professors and students.
This is only one outstanding school in a single American state. It must be unacceptable that so much of the general population -- even students at this same University of Pittsburgh -- may not realize how amazing and important is the scholarship that is emerging in their midst.
Reviews in newspapers of important scholarly works in the humanities and sciences have never been so incompetent or non-comprehending as during recent years. For example, a recent review attributed to Edward Frenkel, "Ad Infinitum," in The New York Times Book Review, February 14, 2014, p. 21 contains this memorable sentence which is far from the worst in the essay: "Any question is answered in one of them, but no one knows which one."
Several initial difficulties facing Brandom's argument should be noted: 1) Brandom's foundational position in logic and epistemology is best classified as a form of Rationalism combined with both pragmatist and analytical commitments in methodology, requiring some explanation; 2) the combination of these commitments with what I take to be a generally idealist stance in metaphysics leads to Brandom's creative use of Kant and Hegel in addition to classical American philosophers. ("Derek Parfit's Ethics" and "What is Enlightenment?")
Brandom's contribution to the logic of conceptual usage is important, but is mostly beyond the scope of my present essay. Brandom sees rationality as integral to human freedom and, accordingly, assigns an important place to philosophy in the construction of selfhood or "what it means to be a person." It is this idea that most interests me. ("Why philosophy is for everybody.")
Classification of Brandom's work immediately raises several difficult issues and opens lines of attack against his philosophy: Rationalism in the twenty-first century implies a confidence in what Spinoza describes as "the unaided powers of reason" that is not only controversial today, but even "dinosaur-like" for many intellectuals, particularly for those sharing my commitments to radical phenomenology and hermeneutics in Continental philosophy, both in America and Europe, or elsewhere. I should note the growing importance of hermeneutics in China, for example, and within Japan's new generation of Kyoto School philosophers. ("Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz" and "'Inception': A Movie Review.")
In the aftermath of Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Butler and others, Brandom clings to the quaint notion of a priori truth and logic, coherence, holism, as well as analytical philosophy's standards of clarity and cogency, together with argumentative rigor and proof, for excellent philosophical reasons, which are annoyingly difficult for those of us in the Continental school to refute. ("Hilary Putnam is Keeping It Real" and "Bernard Williams and Identity.")
Brandom is willing to take on the entire existentialist tradition from Kierkegaard to Sartre with its celebrated skepticism about reason as well as ignoring Marxist and Freudian reservations concerning the true source of seemingly objective rational conclusions as a result of, respectively, economic and/or subconscious forms of determinism.
Professor Brandom is willing to sidestep feminist assertions that reason or "Western logos" is "phallocentric" and, thus, not to be trusted. I suggest aligning Brandom's reasoning in this book with Christopher Peacocke's equally elegant and persuasive analytical defense of Rationalism. I will refer to Peacocke's texts later in this essay. ("Carlos Fuentes and Multiculturalism" and "Cornel West On Universality.")
Brandom's rational agents seem to lack any or all gender(s) and/or any racial identity that defines them. This will lead many readers to dismiss Brandom's book as "part of the patriarchy." The stratospheric level of abstraction may well be viewed as disingenuous, at best, if not dishonest after so many leading theorists have devoted decades to demonstrating the "maleness" of the Western philosophical subject. ("Michel Foucault and the Authorship Question" then "Judith Butler and Gender Theory.")
Brandom is willing to defend the objectivity of the proposition that 2 + 2 = 4 even if the rational agent performing this calculation is a Latina lesbian attending the New School University in New York. Robert Brandom, "The Significance of Complex Numbers for Frege's Philosophy of Mathematics," Proceedings of the Aristotelean Society, 96 (1996), pp. 293-315.
Brandom argues for confidence in a priori inferences of a familiar sort: I have two friends visiting my home where I live alone, one of whom is a man and the other is a woman. I find the man sitting in my living room and learn that my other guest is visiting the rest room. May I infer, a priori, that the person in my bathroom and/or rest room is, in fact, the woman who is a guest in my home?
Brandom confidently asserts that this is a safe inference that reflects a correct use of a number of concepts, such as "man" and "woman." After Judith Butler's writings, however, we may feel a bit nervous about such confidence on the part of Professor Brandom. ("What you will ..." and "A Doll's Aria.")
With all reservations and deconstructive techniques noted, I tend to agree with Professor Brandom concerning the validity of the a priori inference in this context, as does Oxford's Professor Onora O'Neil and Cambridge's Jennifer Hornsby, I believe, who is now at the University of London. Perhaps even Judith Butler may grant the logical point. True, this fondness for logic -- shared with Miami logician Susan Haack -- may be "demeaning to women." ("Richard Rorty's Ethical Skepticism.")
I begin with a clear definition of Brandom's version of Rationalism and the analytical tradition that is set beside a standard understanding of the "concept." A contrast with the writings of Deleuze and Guattari on conceptual usage in the Continental tradition may be pursued by those who are so-inclined. Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 15-117. ("What is a concept?" and "Conceptual Personae.")
This foundational discussion leads to a friendly contrast, also, with radical phenomenological-hermeneutics leading to some questions concerning "rational agency" as distinct from "interpretive rationality" as a philosophical strategy. Common ground is discovered in Brandom's defense of "philosophy as freedom" for persons that mirrors several suggestive arguments offered by Alain Badiou in his Manifestos For Philosophy. I am sure that both of these philosophers are correct concerning the vital importance of, and need for, philosophy today.
II.
" ... philosophy begins in logic." Brandom says: "For as I remarked in the opening sentence of this Introduction, in the broadly rationalist tradition to which this work belongs, philosophy is demarcated by its concern to understand, articulate, explain the notion of reason that distinguishes us as rational animals, discursive, concept-using, sapient beings. Specifically, logical self-consciousness is a matter of being able to make claims and reason about reasoning, about inference and the inferential relations that articulate the contents of non-logical concepts. So logic makes possible already a kind of distinctively philosophically reflection." (Brandom, p. 12, emphasis in original.)
For Brandom, rationality is a normative concept. ("John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism" and "Why I am not an ethical relativist.")
The "space of reasons" is a "normative space," which Brandom believes, leads to a pragmatist order of explanation. My quotation marks are significant as will become evident later in my discussion. This is to account for meaning in terms of use. Brandom postulates that the "rational agent" can abstract the inferential relations that articulate conceptual content from "the reasoning processes and inferential processes of discursive practitioners." (Brandom, p. 12.)
Brandom's analytical commitments seem to be derived from Frege by way of Michael Dummett and to focus on the semantics of rationality: " ... analytical philosophy holds that the true logical content of complex propositions is concealed by ordinary language and can be made clear only by painstaking and reductive analysis of terms."
Ted Hondereich, ed., The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 28-30.
Rationalism, again, is "any of a variety of views emphasizing the role of reason, usually including intuition, in contrast to sensory experience (including introspection), the feelings, or authority." (Oxford Companion to Philosophy, p. 741.)
By way of comparison, Simon Blackburn offers this definition of Rationalism: "Any philosophy magnifying the role played by unaided reason in the acquisition and justification of knowledge. ... The Continental Rationalists (Descartes, Leibnitz, Spinoza) are frequently contrasted with the British empiricists (Locke, Berkeley, Hume), but such oppositions usually simplify a more complex practice."
Dictionary of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 318.
The rival options today would not include A.J. Ayer's logical positivism since that position has been left behind by philosophy and science: Bernard Williams, "The Concept of a Person by A.J. Ayer," in Essays and Reviews 1959-2002 (Oxford & Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), pp. 45-47 then Ben Rodgers, A.J. Ayer: A Life (New York: Grove Press, 1999), pp. 118-122.
For an updating of this discussion in a phenomenological form of Rationalism, compare Calvin O. Shrag, The Resources of Rationality: A Response to the Postmodern Challenge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 148-181 with Christopher Peacocke's analytical approach to Rationalism, The Realm of Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), pp. 148-194 and, more generally, Christopher Peacocke, A Study of Concepts (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992).
Classical empiricism is also not an option after the quantum revolution in twentieth century physics as well as Chomsky's linguistics. These developments in intellectual life have made it very clear that the human mind comes with a priori or preformed categories that determine the structures of our language use and possibilities of thought. Mathematical and logical structure is capable of mapping, non-observationally -- even in the absence of sense-data -- aspects of reality strictly on an a priori basis:
" ... this is just another example of what the eminent physicist Eugene Wigner called the 'unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.' [Philosophical logic.] Why should such woolly and abstract concepts as zeta functions or imaginary numbers, the products of a chess game in our minds, have such relevance in describing the world?"
Dennis Ovebye, "Assigning a Value to Infinity: What do you get when you add an infinite series of natural numbers? A Magical Figure," The New York Times, Science Times, February 4, 2014, p. D6.
Not only is there such a thing, apparently, as reliable a priori knowledge, but it seems to serve humanity extremely well in predicting future states of what is called "reality." Please see Quassim Cassam, "Rationalism, Empiricism, and the A Priori," in P. Boghossian & C. Peacocke, eds., New Essays On the A Priori (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) then Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1965) and Roger Penrose, The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and The Laws of Physics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), (2nd Ed., with new Preface). Finally, please see Robert Nozick's definition of the "rational man" in Socratic Puzzles (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 39-44 and C. Peacocke, "How Are A Priori Truths Possible?," European Journal of Philosophy, Vol. I, pp. 175-199 (1993).
Perhaps the most important discussion of these issues that I have encountered in recent scholarship is found in chapter four of Reason in Philosophy, pages 111-129.
Brandom's defense of philosophy's vital role in the lives of persons and societies comes at a time when conceptual errors and, among other things, philosophical ignorance is producing suffering and waste on a colossal scale. ("Ape and Essence" and "Albert Florence and New Jersey's Racism.")
To mention only one example, billions of dollars are being spent on efforts to "map" the cognitive capacities of the human mind by examining the brain in order to establish "the 'physicalist' basis of consciousness." It may be that this effort is well-founded -- I seriously doubt it -- but it is obvious that very little serious thought has been given by scientists to the numerous, highly controversial and doubtful philosophical assumptions being made concerning the definition and scope of the concepts of mind and consciousness, or the many distinctions to be drawn between these concepts. It is, for instance, taken for granted that consciousness is (or can be) contained in strictly physicalist explanations that ignore, say, culture or history. ("John Searle and David Chalmers On Consciousness" and "The Galatea Scenario and the Mind/Body Problem.")
Another example is found in the continuing A.I. controversy where opposed assumptions are being made by scientists, often the same scientists, concerning "consciousness" which is now seen as an abstract logical algorithm that is capable of being modelled for mechanical intelligence systems or computers. ("Mind and Machine" and "Consciousness and Computers.")
Efforts to create conscious machines, accordingly, involve necessary philosophical assumptions and concepts inherent to whatever programming language is developed by computer scientists unaware that they are making these theoretical assumptions -- assumptions that are often mutually contradictory about concepts that are undefined or poorly understood.
In preparing for Brandom's comments on why philosophy matters, I should make clear his final definition of "rational agency" that leads to a Kantian stance with respect to the normative component of cognitivity. Professor Okrent does the heavy lifting for me on this issue:
"An agent is rational in Brandom's sense just in case she draws inferences in a way that is evaluable according to the inferential role of the concepts involved in those inferences, where the inferential role of a concept is specified in terms of the conditions under which an agent would be entitled to apply, or prohibited from applying, that concept, together with what else an agent would be entitled or committed to by the appropriate application of the concept." (Review of Reason in Philosophy.)
This understanding of rational agency weaves "evaluation" or norms into all cognition, especially philosophical thought in Kantian-Hegelian terms:
"Brandom's Kant holds that an entity is responsible for its judgments and its acts just in case it is capable of taking responsibility for those acts and judgments, Brandom's Kant is committed to the view that the unity of apperception is achieved through a process in which an agent unifies her judgments by coming to believe what she ought to believe (has reason to believe) given her other judgments and the content of the concepts ingredient in those judgments." (Ibid.)
This appears to be a static coherentism, but Brandom adds a social or Hegelian dimension that is much more dynamic:
"Hegel's principal innovation is his idea that in order to follow through on Kant's fundamental insight into the essentially normative character of mind, meaning, and rationality, we need to recognize that normative statuses such as authority and responsibility are at base social statuses." (Brandom, p. 66.)
This move allows Brandom to examine philosophy's importance as one such dynamic and social discipline (nature) with a controversial history.
III.
Brandom begins his discussion of philosophy's meaning and role with this ancient distinction between things that have a nature and things that have a history: Physical objects and entities are usually thought of as possessing a "nature"; cultural formations or practices, such as Romantic poetry and Ponzi schemes, have a "history".
It follows that philosophy, as a cultural phenomenon or form of reason-driven inquiry, is endowed with a unique "nature" or "essence" in the Greek terminology. Philosophy in the Western world is also thought of, parochially, as something beginning in the ancient Mediterrenean world with tentative roots elsewhere, like China and India, or Africa.
In today's ever-smaller and technologically-sophisticated world, Brandom's terms seem especially cramped in these definitions, if not downright insulting to scholars in non-Western societies. Much is simply ommitted from analytical philosophy's consideration in recent discussions to its great loss.
A difficulty that Brandom notices is that this foundational distinction between nature and history is based on, or may be itself a cultural formation with a history. The suggestion, again, is that philosophy -- like its students -- is something with both a nature and history, static and dynamic, Parmenides and/or Heraclitus.
The parallel between philosophy, as an activity, and what is usually called "human nature" is significant to Brandom's later argument in this chapter and, evidently, to much of his work.
For Brandom, now in Hegelian terms, philosophers discern the nature of concepts as revealed by their history. The meaning of concepts is found in their use at different historical moments. An important comparison to the existentialist-hermeneutic definition of concepts, as "metaphors," may be instructive:
"The development of consciousness in human beings is inseparably connected with the use of metaphor. ["Metaphor is Mystery" and "Magician's Choice."] Metaphors are not merely peripheral decorations or even useful models, they are fundamental forms of our awareness of our condition: metaphors of space, metaphors of movement, metaphors of vision. Philosophy in general, and moral philosophy in particular, has in the past often concerned itself with what it took to be our most important images, clarifying existing ones and developing new ones. Philosophical argument consists of such image play."
Iris Murdoch, "The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts," in The Sovereignty of Good, p. 77 (emphasis added). Please see: Juan Galis-Menendez, Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Freedom (North Carolina: Lulu, 2004).
Brandom says: "Philosophy is a reflexive enterprise: understanding is not only the goal of philosophical inquiry, but its topic as well. We are its topic; but it is us specifically as understanding creatures: discursive beings, makers and takers of reasons, seekers and speakers of truth. Seeing philosophy as addressing the nature and conditions of our rationality is, of course, a very traditional outlook -- so traditional, indeed, that it is liable to seem quaint and old-fashioned." (Brandom, p. 113.) (Due to deformations of my text by hackers, I was required to remove the italics from Brandom's original text.)
So much for postmodern suspicions (which are also products of the philosophical tradition) where the "determinate contentfulness" of each skeptical doctrine can only be understood in terms of the "process by which it incorporates the contingencies of the particulars to which it has actually been applied." (Brandom, pp. 112-113.)
This is Brandom's point confirmed, in other words, whether or not we regard skeptical reservations concerning logical truth as also applicable to Brandom's philosophy. Brandom's concern is with defective concepts (i.e., "superior" races) which limit our options or deviate thought into blind alleys. ("Is Western Philosophy Racist?")
Such flawed concepts obstruct what and how we are able to "see" or construct reality. Philosophy exposes the commitments implicit in concepts -- makes those commitments explicit -- which are always subject to rational challenge and debate. This leads to one of Brandom's "fusion-insights" that is both analytical and Continental holding that the very idea of a concept is normative:
"Kant replaces the ontological distinction between the physical and the mental with the deontological distinction between things that merely act regularly and things that are subject to distinctively normative sorts of assessments." (Brandom, p. 115.) ("Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")
Brandom moves from this insight to the observation and argument that motivated me to write this essay.
The following paragraph contains a powerful and, essentially, valid argument communicating an important truth not simply about philosophy or logic, but (more importantly) about persons. This passage is so important, in fact, that it justifies the cost of the book:
"I think that philosophy is the study of us as creatures who judge and act, that is, as discursive, concept-using creatures. And I think that Kant is right to emphasize that understanding what we do in these terms is attributing to us various kinds of normative status, taking us to be subject to distinctive sorts of normative appraisal. So a central philosophical task is understanding this fundamental normative dimension within which we dwell. Kant's own approach to this issue, developing themes from Rousseau, is based on the thought that genuinely normative authority (constraint by norms) is distinguished from causal power (constraint by facts) in that it binds only those who acknowledge it as binding. Because one is subject only to that authority one subjects oneself to, the normative realm can be understood equally as the realm of freedom. So being constrained by norms is not only compatible with freedom -- properly understood, it can be seen to be what freedom consists in. I don't know of a thought that is deeper, more difficult, or more important than this." (Brandom, p. 117.) (Again: "Why I am not an ethical relativist" and "Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom.")
I agree on this issue. This is to suggest that to the extent we think and act at all, we are philosophizing -- even if we are not self-consciously or academically "philosophical." Valuing and truth inheres in all thinking or acting on "reality."
Brandom sees persons as reason-seeking and -giving animals, ordering their experience of reality as a matter of "being" what they are. This necessarily involves norms. I am sure that, as I say, there is a powerful truth articulated in this chapter, yet I am also troubled that something important is excluded from this discussion.
Analytical philosophy often achieves its clarity by avoiding serious difficulties in complex areas of philosophy, like gender-identity or power relations among races and between men and women in society -- areas of philosophy where matters are no so easily reduced to logical puzzles.
I have read several interviews and commentaries on Brandom's writings. His work is certainly important, but it appears distant from so many of the horrors that we live with and struggle against. In an age of such great calamities we may wonder whether philosophers have public responsibilities beyond those of ordinary citizens.
If I were standing at Auschwitz or the killing fields of Cambodia, in Iraq or Afghanistan today -- would I feel the importance of these logical figure-eights?
Brandom may respond that, in posing this very question, I am demonstrating his point concerning the necessary deployment of concepts. He may well be correct in this response. However, this may not be enough of an answer to my criticism.
This very methodological observation may be lost to many readers appreciating the intricacy of Brandom's elegant and subtle abstractions, but unable to share in the discussion. Philosophy must matter in the public square, for the vast majority of people, including those without graduate degrees. Accordingly, I see the explicatory or popularizing role as an important one. Perhaps popularizing is a role that Brandom is content to leave to others, like me, because it is certainly not a role performed in this book.
A related concern is that Brandom may be preaching to the converted. Those of us able to read his book and appreciate his argument are not the persons most in need of understanding him. This is especially true in a commercial and military-minded culture that is increasingly anti-intellectual and impatient with the products of high culture that has chosen to ghettoize or eliminate philosophy, as well as many other academic subjects, from universities and public discourse. ("What is education for?" and "Nihilists in Disneyworld.")
For Brandom, philosophers (like lawyers, he says) are engaged in a collective enterprise of "working pure" the conceptual vocabulary for abstract reflection on ultimate issues of knowledge and ethics or politics, even law, in our society. It is only such foundational concepts that make it appropriate to do (or not to do) something, as a community, as when we decide that an "event" is also a "crime." (Compare "Ronald Dworkin On Law as Interpretation" and "Ronald Dworkin Says: 'The Law Works Itself Pure!'" with "Richard A. Posner On Voluntary Actions and Criminal Responsibility.")
Brandom's work connects to the writings of Alain Badiou, especially Being and Event. The philosophical task of providing "explanations" for when concepts may be used "appropriately" cannot be discharged well (or at all) if persons are poorly educated in our theoretical tradition governing such matters. For this reason and many others, we need philosophy in the university curriculum and in our public debates.
America is experiencing a crisis concerning its foundational concepts and values, not unlike the Athenian experience before the first great flowering of philosophy. We are uncertain of the relevance of the Constitution and Bill of Rights given the challenges of international terrorism and the realities of the twenty-first century. Resolving such questions and self-doubts, finding our identity, as a nation, at this critical moment in our history and responding to the economic challenge from Asia (whatever else it may be) is a philosophical dilemma as well as a political problem.
Are we prepared to resolve that philosophical dilemma in a manner that includes and meets the needs of all citizens?
Brandom's work is one contribution to thinking well and clearly about such matters, but the answer to this question has yet to be found.
"Analytic philosophy may be seen to have pursued one aspect of Kant's thought, namely, that of showing how phenomenal intuitions could be 'brought under' adequate concepts and thus preserve the basis for a theory of knowledge that would not fall prey to metaphysical illusions."
Christopher Norris comments and adds:
"From the hermeneutic viewpoint, conversely, the project foundered on Kant's inability to explain just how intuitions and concepts could be thought of as somehow 'corresponding' one with another, given their utterly different character. This problem gave rise to some notoriously obscure passages in the 'Transcendental Analytic' where Kant referred to an 'art of judgment' -- an art, moreover, 'buried in the depths of the soul' -- whereby the two orders of phenomenal experience and conceptual understanding might somehow be bridged or reconciled. It was just these passages that Heidegger singled out (in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics) as exposing the limits of Kantian epistemology and revealing a dimension of 'authentic' depth-hermeneutical thought which lay beyond its utmost powers of exposition."
"Epistemology Versus Rational Reconstruction," in Minding the Gap: Epistemology & Philosophy of Science in the Two Traditions (Amherst: University of Mass., 2000), p. 8. (The answer to this riddle for philosophers sharing my commitment to phenomenology-hermeneutics is provided in the works of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur as well as Judith Butler today.)
