Tales of the mighty dead : historical essays in the metaphysics of intentionality

A Work In The History Of Systematic Philosophy That Is Itself Animated By A Systematic Philosophic Aspiration, This Book By One Of The Most Prominent American Philosophers Working Today Provides An Entirely New Way Of Looking At The Development Of Western Philosophy From Descartes To The Present. Robert B. Brandom Begins By Setting Out A Historical Context And Outlining A Methodological Rationale For His Enterprise. Then, In Chapters On Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel, Frege, Heidegger, And Sellars, He Pursues The Most Fundamental Philosophical Issues Concerning Intentionality, And Therefore Mindedness Itself, Revealing An Otherwise Invisible Set Of Overlapping Themes And Explanatory Strategies. Variously Functionalist, Inferentialist, Holist, Normative, And Social Pragmatist In Character, The Explanations Of Intentionality Offered By These Philosophers, Taken Together, Form A Distinctive Tradition. The Fresh Perspective Afforded By This Tradition Enriches Our Understanding Of The Philosophical Topics Being Addressed, Provides A New Conceptual Vantage Point For Viewing Our Philosophical Ancestors, And Highlights Central Features Of The Sort Of Rationality That Consists In Discerning A Philosophical Tradition—and It Does So By Elaborating A Novel, Concrete Instance Of Just Such An Enterprise. -- Introduction: Five Conceptions Of Rationality -- Talking With A Tradition -- Kant And The Shift From Epistemology To Semantics -- Descartes And The Shift From Resemblance To Representation -- Rationalism And Functionalism -- Rationalism And Inferentialism -- Hegel And Pragmatism -- Texts -- Spinoza -- Leibniz -- Hegel -- Frege -- Heidegger -- Sellars -- Pretexts -- Methodology: The Challenge -- Hermeneutic Platitudes -- De Dicto Specifications Of Conceptual Content -- De Re Specifications Of Conceptual Content -- Tradition And Dialogue -- Reconstructive Metaphysics -- Historical Essays -- Adequacy And The Individuation Of Ideas In Spinoza's Ethics -- Ideas Do Not Represent Their Correlated Bodily Objects -- The Individuation Of Objects -- The Individuation Of Ideas -- Scientia Intuitiva -- A Proposal About Representation -- Conatus -- Ideas Of Ideas -- Leibniz And Degrees Of Perception -- Distinctness Of Perception And Distinctness Of Ideas -- A Theory: Expression And Inference -- Holism And Idealism In Hegel's Phenomenology -- The Problem: Understanding The Determinateness Of The Objective World -- Holism -- Conceptual Difficulties Of Strong Holism -- A Bad Argument -- Objective Relations And Subjective Processes -- Sense Dependence, Reference Dependence, And Objective Idealism -- Beyond Strong Holism: A Model -- Traversing The Moments: Dialectical Understanding -- Some Pragmatist Themes In Hegel's Idealism -- Instituting And Applying Determinate Conceptual Norms -- Self-conscious Selves. Robert B. Brandom. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 369-407) And Index.