Raphaël Tossings | Objects Without Essences | Philosophy Speaker Series

Abstract: In Making It Explicit (1994), Brandom constructs a philosophical system designed to account for the expressivity available to linguistic beings like us. To fulfill this ambition, Brandom characterizes us as thinking and acting within an inferentially articulated space of reasons which is both made by us and constitutive of what we take ourselves to be.

However, Brandom has often been accused by his peers of ignoring the obvious fact that we all experience the same world and the same objects. According to such readers, inferentialism fails to elucidate how our thoughts bear on objects whose nature is independent from us. Brandom took this challenge seriously, which lead him to reconsider his views and to endorse a conceptual realism read off Hegel’s writings in A Spirit Of Trust (2019).

In this lecture, I will argue that Brandom should have resisted such pressure. My goal is to show that, in the second part of Making It Explicit, Brandom merged the Fregean account of objects with the anti-essentialism of Rorty to yield a theory of objectivity that accommodates the perspectival and autonomous nature of thinking while preserving the possibility of genuine communication and knowledge of the truth.

Raphaël Tossings is a PhD student and instructor at the University of Ottawa and Sorbonne University whose areas of specialization include philosophy of language and philosophy of mind.