Robert Brandom

Robert Boyce Brandom (born March 13, 1950) is an American philosopher and professor at the University of Pittsburgh. His primary areas of research include the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and philosophical logic. Brandom is renowned for presenting a comprehensive and rigorous approach to explaining linguistic meaning through socially norm-governed use, often summarized by the phrase "meaning as use." This perspective offers a non-representationalist account of intentionality and rationality. He is deeply influenced by philosophers such as Michael Dummett, Richard Rorty, Wilfrid Sellars, John McDowell, Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Gottlob Frege, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. His work is situated within the American pragmatist tradition. Brandom advocates for inferentialism, the idea that the meaning of an expression is determined by its role in inferences. This concept is extensively detailed in his seminal work, *Making It Explicit* (1994), and further explored in *Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism* (2000). He also explores themes of logical expressivism, which posits that logic codifies aspects of discursive practice's inferential structure. Beyond his systematic work, Brandom has engaged with the history of philosophy, publishing essays on intentionality in *Tales of the Mighty Dead* (2002). He has also edited collections of essays, including a volume on Richard Rorty's philosophy. Brandom delivered the prestigious John Locke lectures at Oxford University in 2006, published as *Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism* (2008). His later work includes *A Spirit of Trust* (2019), a detailed reading of Hegel's *Phenomenology of Spirit*.