Robert Boyce Brandom is an American philosopher who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. He works primarily in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and philosophical logic, and his academic output manifests both systematic and historical interests in these topics. His work has presented "arguably the first fully systematic and technically rigorous attempt to explain the meaning of linguistic items in terms of their socially norm-governed use, thereby also giving a non-representationalist account of the intentionality of thought and the rationality of action as well." Brandom is broadly considered to be part of the Americanpragmatist tradition in philosophy. In 2003 he won the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award.
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 Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Gottlob Frege, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. He is best known for his investigations of linguistic meanings, or semantics. He advocates the view that the meaning of an expression is fixed by how it is used in inferences. This project is developed at length in his influential 1994 book Making It Explicit, and more briefly in Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism ; a chapter of that latter work, "Semantic Inferentialism and Logical Expressivism", outlines the main themes of representationalism vs. inferentialism and inferentialism's relationship to logical expressivism. Brandom has also published a collection of essays on the history of philosophy, Tales of the Mighty Dead, 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. Brandom delivered the 2006 John Locke lectures at Oxford University, which Oxford University Press published under the title Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism. In 2019 he published A Spirit of Trust, a book about Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.
Rorty and His Critics, edited, with an introduction by Robert Brandom. Original essays by: Rorty, Habermas, Davidson, Putnam, Dennett, McDowell, Bouveresse, Brandom, Williams, Allen, Bilgrami, Conant, and Ramberg. Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, July 2000
Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism, Harvard University Press, 2000, 230 pp.
Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality, Harvard University Press, 2002.
In the Space of Reasons: Selected Essays of Wilfrid Sellars, edited with an introduction by Kevin Scharp and Robert Brandom. Harvard University Press, 2007.
Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism, Oxford University Press, 2008.
Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas, Harvard University Belknap Press, 2009.
Perspectives on Pragmatism: Classical, Recent, & Contemporary, Harvard University Press, 2011.
From Empiricism to Expressivism: Brandom Reads Sellars, Harvard University Press, 2015
