Reading Brandom: On Making It Explicit

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.

Bernhard Weiss is Senior Lecturer in philosophy at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.  He is the author of Michael Dummett (2002) and co-editor of Wittgenstein's Lasting Significance (Routledge 2004).  

Jeremy Wanderer is Lecturer in philosophy at the University of Cape Town.