Robert Brandom

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Western Philosophers Contemporary Philosophy
Name:	Robert B. Brandom
Birth:	March 13, 1950
School/tradition:	Analytic
Main interests:	Pragmatism, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Logic
Influences:	Wilfrid Sellars, Michael Dummett, Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Richard Rorty
Influenced:	Mark Lance

Robert Brandom (1950- ), nicknamed "Bob," is an American philosopher who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. He works primarily in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and philosophical logic. He earned his B.A. from Yale University and his Ph.D. from Princeton University, under Richard Rorty and David Kellogg Lewis. He is married to Barbara Brandom, a professor in the medical school at the University of Pittsburgh.

Brandom's work is heavily influenced by that of Wilfrid Sellars, Richard Rorty, Michael Dummett and his Pittsburgh colleague John McDowell. He also draws heavily on the works of G. W. F. Hegel, Gottlob Frege, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

He is best-known for an ongoing project to recast philosophy of language in an inferentialist mode (see inferential role semantics) as an alternative to representationalist semantics. Roughly, the idea is to carry out the Wittgensteinian task of explaining meaning in terms of use. This project is developed at length in his influential 1994 book, Making It Explicit, and more briefly in Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (2000). Brandom has also published a collection of essays on the history of philosophy, Tales of the Mighty Dead (2002), a critical and historical sketch of what he calls the "philosophy of intentionality". He is the editor of a collection of papers about Richard Rorty's philosophy, Rorty and His Critics (2000). He delivered the 2006 John Locke lectures at Oxford University, and their publication is forthcoming. Brandom is currently working on a book dealing with Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.