Making it explicit and clear: From ‘strong’ to ‘hyper-’ inferentialism in Brandom and Peirce

This article explores how Robert Brandom's original "inferentialist" philosophical framework should be positioned with respect to the classical pragmatist tradition. It is argued that Charles Peirce's original attack (in "Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man" and other early papers) on the use of "intuition" in nineteenth-century philosophy of mind is in fact a form of inferentialism, and thus an antecedent relatively unexplored by Brandom in his otherwise comprehensive and illuminating "tales of the mighty dead." However, whereas Brandom stops short at a merely "strong" inferentialism, which admits some non-inferential mental content (although it is parasitic on the inferential and can only be "inferentially articulated"), Peirce embraces a total, that is, "hyper-," inferentialism. Some consequences of this difference are explored, and Peirce's more thoroughgoing position is defended

Liberalism and Rationalism at the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 1902–1903

This article reconstructs and analyzes a debate on “the crisis of liberalism” that took place in a prominent philosophy journal, the Revue de me´taphysique et de morale, in 1902–3. The debate was actuated by combiste anticlerical measures and the apparently liberal demand made by Catholics for freedom of instruction. Participants—all hostile to the church—sought to articulate a principled, rationalist liberalism that could respond to the needs of the republic in the post-Dreyfus era. Participants—including Célestin Bouglé, Dominique Parodi, Gustave Lanson, Elie Halévy, and Paul Lapie—balanced each in their own way the demands of rationalism, democracy, and modernity. The debate opens a window onto the transition between the Second Empire’s dissident, neo-Kantian, liberal republicanism and the antitotalitarian liberalism that Hale´vy and his student Raymond Aron would articulate in the interwar years

Georges Sorel’s Diremption: Hegel, Marxism and Anti-Dialectics

Georges Sorel’s use of the term diremption to describe his method has long been found obscure. This paper shows that the term was associated with Hegel, and that interpreting it in this light can help us make sense of Sorel’s method. Sorel, this is to say, in his revision of Marxism and his social theory more generally, was engaging specifically with Hegelian philosophy. In addition to clarifying Sorel’s method, this perspective allows us both to place Sorel more clearly in his fin-de-siècle context and to draw connections between his work and more recent marxisant theory

The Notion of Authority (A Brief Presentation)

Citation: Brandom, E. (2015). The Notion of Authority (A Brief Presentation). German Studies Review, 38(2), 438-439. Retrieved from ://WOS:000355374300027In the 1930s, Alexandre Koyré gave a regular seminar on G.W.F. Hegel at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris. Koyré was born in Russia but left as an adolescent to study with Edmund Husserl in Germany. After a few years he left in turn for Paris. In 1936, Alexandre Kojève—younger than Koyré by a decade but following a similar trajectory from Russia through German universities to Paris—took the place of his older colleague at the head of the seminar, which became a paragraph-by-paragraph reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). This seminar became legendary and remains the thing for which Kojève is best known today. Rather than enter the university, Kojève spent the postwar years working in the French ministry of foreign economic relations. He was among the technocrats responsible for setting the course of European economic integration. There is a great deal more to Kojève’s body of philosophical work than the famous seminar, a few polemical or provocative essays—such as the famous exchange with Leo Strauss (reprinted in recent Chicago editions of Strauss’s On Tyranny)—and whatever meaning one might assign to his role in building the European Union. In recent decades, Kojève’s voluminous manuscripts and papers, held at the Bibliotheque nationale in Paris, have become available to researchers. Hager Weslati, translator of the book under review here, is among a new generation of scholars busily exploiting this material

Violence in Translation: Georges Sorel, Liberalism, and Totalitarianism from Weimar to Woodstock

This paper traces readings of Georges Sorel (1847-1922) from Carl Schmitt to Saul Bellow. The image of Sorel that came out of Weimar-era sociological debate around Schmitt and Karl Mannheim was simplified and hardened by émigré scholars in the war years, put to good use in the anti-totalitarian combat of the 1950s, and finally shattered when applied to the unfamiliar situation of the 1960s in the United States. Scholars taken with the problem of the political intellectual and the closely related problem of the relationship between instrumental and critical reason play the central role in this reception history. Sorel’s commingling of left and right justified attempts to replace this organization of political space with one around totalitarian and free societies

Against the hierarchy of knowledge: Georges Sorel, education and revolution

Georges Sorel’s ideas about education are key to making sense of his critique of the Third Republic. Cutting across the heated debates over classical as opposed to modern curricula, Sorel drew on a complex account of the nature of scientific knowledge to offer a sustained defense of education within the factory and on the picket line as a source of individual autonomy. Sorel’s refusal of the practices and modes of institutionalization of liberal education in his own time is a standing challenge for those who would defend liberal education today

Violence and Resistance to the State: Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence

This paper explains the meaning and significance of violence in Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence (1908) through an examination of three distinctions that structure the book. First between the proletarian strike and the merely political strike; second between myth and utopia; third between violence and force. The paper looks to Sorel’s earlier and later writings, and to the strike actions unfolding around him, to argue that violence was a relatively novel topic for Sorel, and in the Reflections it is connected to an understanding of the State that comes to define it

Georges Sorel’s Study on Vico

This English translation of Sorel’s Study on Vico opens the way to a radical re-evaluation not only of Sorel’s trajectory, but of his French intellectual contexts, and the anarcho-syndicalism he is sometimes said to represent Readership: Students and researchers of fin de siècle European intellectual history; historians of the social sciences, and Marxism; students of Vico’s legacy and of Sorel’s social thought. Anyone interested in the roots of cultural studies

When playing God: Concerning artificial reproduction

This thesis is a discussion about new reproductive technologies and the ethical implications of those technologies. Until now, fetal personhood was the focus of pro-choice and pro-life groups battling about abortion versus women\u27s rights. However, new reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization and cryopreservation further complicate the foundation upon which traditional abortion arguments are based. The focus of the argument should be shifted from fetal personhood to a more comprehensive argument for the respect of the sanctity of human life. This shift would force society to address the more crucial issues which have led us to abortion and new reproductive technologies--reproductive irresponsibility. Six contributors to the area of abortion and new reproductive technologies are reviewed in order to establish the state of the arguments. I conclude that the sanctity of human life and sexual responsibility is a better focal point for the ethical discussion of new reproductive technologies

Interview with Robert Brandom

Interview with Prof. Robert Brandom, University of Pittsburg, about Inferentialism, pragmatism, philosophy of language and Hege