From German Idealism to American Pragmatism - and back | Prof Robert Brandom

'From German Idealism to American Pragmatism - and back': Keynote lecture of 2015 Summer Institute in American Philosophy delivered by Robert Brandom (University of Pittsburgh). June 12, 2015.

Kant’s most basic idea, the axis around which all his thought turns, is that what distinguishes exercises of judgment and intentional agency from the performances of merely natural creatures is that judgments and actions are subject to distinctive kinds of normative assessment. Judgments and actions are things we are in a distinctive sense responsible for.

The classical pragmatist versions of naturalism and empiricism fit together much better than the traditional and logical empiricist versions that preceded and succeeded them. Far from being in tension, they complement and mutually support one another. Both the world and our knowledge of it are construed on a single model: as mutable, contingent products of statistical selectional-adaptational processes that allow order to pop to the surface and float in a sea of random variability. Both nature and experience are to be understood in terms of the processes by which relatively stable constellations of habits arise and sustain themselves through their interactions with an environment that includes a population of competing habits.

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