[Xmca-l] Re: Brandom Reads Sellars

[Andy Blunden]

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674187283
I think Robert Brandom is worth a read. He criticises analytical 
philosophy very much from within and in the language of analytical 
philosophy, which makes him readable for a lot of scientists and 
philosophers in the English-speaking world. So if you like Sellars, this 
book would be highly recommended. There are aspects of CHAT where we 
find Brandom as an ally.
Personally, I've had my fill of Brandom, but if you haven't read him, 
and you are not averse to arguments about how many angels sit on the 
head of a pin from time to time (I mean arguments about psychology that 
never refer to an empirical finding or a practical need, but move 
entirely within the sphere of logical argument), then this is the book 
for you.
Andy
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/


Larry Purss wrote:
> Andy
> Anew book by Brandom titled "From Empiricism to Expressivism" has just been
> published. Here is a blub:
>
> The American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars ranks as one of the leading
> twentieth-century critics of empiricism—a philosophical approach to
> knowledge that seeks to ground it in human sense experience. Sellars stood
> in the forefront of a recoil within analytic philosophy from the
> foundationalist assumptions of contemporary empiricists. *From Empiricism
> to Expressivism* is a far-reaching reinterpretation of Sellars from one of
> the philosopher’s most brilliant intellectual heirs.
>
> Unifying and extending Sellars’s most important ideas, Robert Brandom
> constructs a theory of pragmatic expressivism which, in contrast to
> empiricism, understands meaning and knowledge in terms of the role
> expressions play in social practices. The key lies in Sellars’s radical
> reworking of Kant’s idea of the categories: the idea that the expressive
> job characteristic of many of the most important philosophical concepts is
> not to describe or explain the empirical world but rather to make explicit
> essential features of the conceptual framework that makes description and
> explanation possible.
>
> Brandom reconciles otherwise disparate elements of Sellars’s system,
> revealing a greater level of coherence and consistency in the philosopher’s
> arguments against empiricism than has usually been acknowledged. *From
> Empiricism to Expressivism* clarifies what Sellars had in mind when he
> talked about moving analytic philosophy from its Humean to its Kantian
> phase, and why such a move might be of crucial importance today.
>
>
> I thought the concept of "expressive pragmaticism" may have relevance to
> others
>
>
>