Pragmatism and Idealism: Rorty and Hegel on Representation and Reality

Robert B. Brandom's book offers a pragmatist approach to representation and reality, drawing on Richard Rorty and Hegel. He emphasizes the anti-authoritarian credentials of pragmatism and sees it as the fighting faith of a second phase of the Enlightenment. Brandom shows how pragmatism moves beyond the traditional model of reality as authoritative to a new conception of how discursive practices help us cope with the vicissitudes of life. Hegel's idealism provides a concrete pragmatist alternative to Rorty's anti-representationalism.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 160 pages
Publication date: 17 November 2022
Publisher: Oxford University Press

In this concise book, Robert B. Brandom presents a pragmatic perspective on representation and reality, drawing upon the ideas of Richard Rorty and Hegel. During the latter part of his life, Rorty emphasized the anti-authoritarian nature of his pragmatism, viewing it as the fighting faith of a second phase of the Enlightenment. The first stage, as Rorty understood it, concerned our liberation from nonhuman authority in practical matters, such as determining what actions we should take and how things should be. The envisioned second stage addresses our emancipation from nonhuman authority in theoretical matters.

Brandom demonstrates how pragmatism transcends the traditional notion of reality as authoritative over our cognitive representations of it in language and thought. Instead, he proposes a new understanding of how discursive practices assist us in navigating the complexities of life. Hegel anticipates the challenge to the very idea of objective reality as providing norms for thought, which Rorty believed necessitated a second phase of the Enlightenment. Unlike Rorty, Hegel offers a detailed, constructive, anti-authoritarian, non-fetishistic, and social pragmatist account of the representational dimension of conceptual content. At its core lies an account of the social dimension of discursive normativity in terms of reciprocal recognition, and an account of the historical dimension of discursive normativity in terms of a distinctive new conception of reason: the recollective rationality that transforms a past into a tradition.

His idealism thus presents a concrete pragmatist alternative to Rorty's global semantic and epistemological anti-representationalism.

Weight: 182g
Dimension: 195 x 129 x 15 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780192870216