Anti-Representationalism as Neopragmatism and Global Expressivism (2020)

Two Forms of Contemporary

Antirepresentationalism:

Pragmatism and Expressivism

Syllabus
Anti-Representationalism as Neopragmatism and Global Expressivism
Philosophy 2695—Fall 2020
Tuesday 1:15pm to 3:45pm, on Zoom
Bob Brandom
www.pitt.edu/~rbrandom
Week 1. August 18, 2020:
Introduction. The Concept of Representation.
Descriptivism and Semantic Representationalism.
Two Kinds of Anti-Representationalism.
Handout for Week 1
Presentation Notes for Week 1
Video of Week 1
Audio of Week 1
Part One
Antirepresentationalism as Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and Cheryl Misak
Week 2. August 25, 2020:
Rorty’s Critique of Enlightenment Representationalism, and (so) of Analytic Philosophy.
Handout for Week 2
Presentation Notes for Week 2
Video of Week 2
Audio of Week 2
• Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) Introduction.
• Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) Ch. 3.
• Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) Ch. 4.
Supplementary:
o Rorty, “The World Well Lost” (1972).
o Bruce Kuklick, “40 Years After Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” (2019).
Week 3. September 1, 2020:
Rorty Finds His Pragmatist Voice
Handout for Week 3--Some Rorty Quotations
Presentation Notes for Week 3
Video of Week 3
Audio of Week 3
• Rorty, “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism” (APA Presidential Address, 1980).
• Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (1982) Introduction.
• Rorty, “Antirepresentationalism, ethnocentrism, and liberalism” (1991).
(which is the Introduction to Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth)
• Rorty, “Overcoming the Tradition: Heidegger and Dewey” (1976).
• Brandom “An Arc of Thought” (2008).
Supplementary:
o John McDowell, “Towards Rehabilitating Objectivity” (in Brandom (ed.) Rorty and His Critics, 1999).
o Yvonne Huetter-Almerigi “Two Forms of Realism:
Making Sense of Rorty’s Controversy with Brandom and Ramberg over Objectivity” (2020).
Week 4. September 8, 2020:
Cheryl Misak’s Critique of Rorty’s Pragmatism
Handout for Week 4
Presentation Notes for Week 4
Video of Week 4
Audio of Week 4
• Misak, “Rorty, Pragmatism, and Analytic Philosophy” (2013).
• Misak, “American Pragmatism and Indispensability Arguments” (Presidential Address, 2011).
• Björn Ramberg, “Being Constructive: Misak’s Creation of Pragmatism” (2013).
o Bruce Kuklick "Who Owns Pragmatism?" (2017).
o Misak, “Pragmatism and Pluralism” (2005).
Supplementary:
o Robert B. Talisse, “Pragmatism Deflated” (on Misak’s Cambridge Platonism, 2018).
o Rorty, “Pragmatism Without Method” (from Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, 1991).
o Christopher Hookway “Review of Cheryl Misak’s The American Pragmatists” (2013).
o Alan Richardson, “What Good is a (Indeed This) History of Pragmatism”
(Review of Misak’s The American Pragmatists, 2013)
o Robert B. Talisse, “Recovering American Philosophy” (Review of Misak’s The American Pragmatists, 2013).
o Misak, “Reply to Four Instructive Critics” (2013).
o H. O. Mounce “Review of Cheryl Misak’s The American Pragmatists” (2015).
Week 5. September 15, 2020:
Rorty’s Literary Kehre
Handout for Week 5
Handout II for Week 5: Rorty's Romanticism
Presentation Notes for Week 5
Video of Week 5
Audio of Week 5
• Rorty, “Nineteenth Century Idealism and Twentieth Century Textualism” (1981).
• Brandom "Vocabularies of Pragmatism: Synthesizing Naturalism and Historicism" (1999).
• [For short version see:] Brandom “Rorty on Vocabularies” (2017).
• Rorty, “Solidarity or Objectivity?” (Howison Lecture, 1983).
Supplementary:
o Ramberg “For the Sake of His Own Generation: Rorty on Destruction and Edification” (2010).
o Ramberg, “Rorty, Davidson, and the Future of Metaphysics in America”
(in Cheryl Misak (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy, 2008).
o Christopher Voparil, “Rorty and Brandom: Pragmatism and the Ontological Priority of the Social” (2011).
In Pragmatism Today, Volume 2
o Bush, "Nothing Outside the Text: Derrida and Brandom on Language and World"
Week 6. September 22, 2020:
Rorty’s Political Kehre
Handout for Week 6
Girona Rorty Poster
Pragmatism: A Version. ToC of Girona Lectures
Presentation Notes for Week 6
Video of Week 6
Audio of Week 6
• Rorty, “Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism” (1999).
• Rorty, Preface to Pragmatism, a View (1999).
• Rorty, “Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism” (Girona Lectures #2, 1996).
o Brandom, “Achieving the Enlightenment” (Foreword to Richard Rorty, Pragmatism: A View,
Eduardo Emendieta (ed.), Harvard University Press, forthcoming in 2021.)
Supplementary:
• Rorty, “Pragmatism and Religion” (Girona Lectures #1, 1996).
Week 7. September 29, 2020:
Assessing Rorty’s Pragmatism as Anti-Representationalism
Handout for Week 7
Presentation Notes for Week 7
Video of Week 7
Audio of Week 7
• Brandom, “Fetishism, Anti-Authoritarianism, and the Second Enlightenment:
Rorty and Hegel on Representation and Reality” (2020).
• Lecture 1: “A Rortyan Master-Argument—Its Premises and Development.”
• Lecture 2: “Hegel’s Recollective Account of Representation.”
Supplementary:
o Brandom, from Articulating Reasons:
"A Social Route from Reasoning to Representing" (2000).
o Paul Redding, “Pragmatism, Idealism, and the Modal Menace:
Rorty, Brandom, and the Truths about Photons” (2013).
o Steven Levine, “Rehabilitating Objectivity: Rorty, Brandom, and the New Pragmatism” (2010)
o Paul Redding, “Rorty on Hegel on the Mind in History” (2020).
Part Two
Antirepresentationalism as Expressivism: Huw Price and Simon Blackburn.
Weeek 8. October 6, 2020:
Anti-Representationalism, Pragmatism, and Expressivism
Handout for Week 8
Presentation Notes for Week 8
Video of Week 8
Audio of Week 8
• Huw Price, “Naturalism without Representationalism” (2007).
• Huw Price and David Macarthur, "Pragmatism, Quasi-Realism, and the Global Challenge"
(from Cheryl Misak, The New Pragmatists, 2007).
Supplementary:
o Brandom "Expressive vs. Explanatory Deflationism About Truth".
o Lionel Shapiro, “Linguistic Function and Content: Reflections on Price’s Pragmatism” (2014).
o Brandon Beasley, "Naturalism Without a Subject: Huw Price's Pragmatism” (2020).
o Brandom, "The Significance of Complex Numbers for Frege's Philosophy of Mathematics".
Week 9. October 13, 2020:
Huw Price on Representationalism, Rorty, and Expressivism
Handout for Week 9
Presentation Notes for Week 9
Video of Week 9
Audio of Week 9
• Price, “One Cheer for Representationalism” (2008).
• Price, “Expressivism for Two Voices” (2010).
• Price, "Two Expressivist Programmes, Two Bifurcations” (2013).
• Simon Blackburn, “Pragmatism: All or Some?” (in Price, Expressivism, Pragmatism, and Representationalism 2013).
Supplementary:
o David Macarthur, “Pragmatism, Metaphysical Quietism, and the Problem of Normativity” (2008).
Week 10. October 20, 2020:
Simon Blackburn on Expressivism and Pragmatism
Handout for Week 10
Handout for Week 10 Part 2 Eliatic Strategies
Presentation Notes for Week 10
Video of Week 10
Audio of Week 10
• Blackburn, “Landscapes of Pragmatism” (2009).
• Blackburn, “Pragmatism: Some or All or Some and All?” [Not the same as the essay from Week 9.]
Supplementary:
o Blackburn, “Wittgenstein, Wright, Rorty and Minimalism” (1998).
o Misak, “Deflating Truth: Pragmatism vs. Minimalism” (1998).
o Price Times Arrow Chapters 1 and 10 (1996)
o Brandom "Reference Explained Away" (1984).
Week 11. October 27, 2020:
Price on Sellars and McDowell, Blackburn on Brandom and McDowell
Handout for Week 11
Presentation Notes for Week 11
Video of Week 11
Audio of Week 11
• Price: “Wilfrid Sellars Meets Cambridge Pragmatism” (2016).
• Price “Idling and Sidling Towards Philosophical Peace” (2010).
• Blackburn, “The Steps from Doing to Saying” (Presidential Address to Aristotelian Society, 2009).
• Blackburn, “Pragmatism, Minimalism, and the Space of Reasons” (2001).
Supplementary:
o Sarin Marchetti, “Brandom and Pragmatism: Remarks on a Still Open Question” (2016).
Week 12. November 3, 2020:
Price's Pragmatist Philosophy of Language
Handout for Week 12
Week 12 Plan
Presentation Notes for Week 12
Video of Week 12
Audio of Week 12
• Price, “Truth as Convenient Friction” (2003).
• Price, Rorty “Exchange on ‘Truth as Convenient Friction’” (2005).
• Price, “Three Norms of Assertibility, or How the MOA Went Extinct” (1998).
• Price, “Why 'Not'?” (1990).
• Brandom, “Truth and Assertibility” (1976).
Supplementary:
• Price, “Quining Naturalism” (2007).
o Albert Atkin, “Intellectual Hope as Convenient Friction” (2015).
o Price, “Truth and the Nature of Assertion” (1987).
o Price, “Metaphysical Pluralism” (1992).
o Michael Williams, “How Pragmatists Can Be Local Expressivists”
(in Huw Price, Expressivism, Pragmatism, and Representationalism 2013).
Week 13. November 10, 2020:
Global or Local Expressivism? The Current State of Play
Handout for Week 13
Presentation Notes for Week 13
Video of Week 13
Audio of Week 13
• Brandom, “Global Anti-Representationalism?”
(in Huw Price, Expressivism, Pragmatism, and Representationalism 2013).
• Price, “From Quasirealism to Global Expressivism – and Back Again?” (2015).
• Price, “Global Expressivism by the Method of Differences” (2019).
Supplementary:
o Ramberg, “Do Pragmatic Naturalists Have Souls?” (2018).
Week 14. November 17, 2020:
Conclusion: Rationales and Prospects for Anti-Representationalism
Handout for Week 14
Presentation Notes for Week 14
Video of Week 14
Audio of Week 14
Supplementary:
o Brandom "The Institution of Normative Statuses by Normative Attitudes" (2019).
Some Further Resources:
 Richard Rorty's webpage, with bibliography
 Richard Rorty Society.
 Rorty, “Intellectual Autobiography” (2010).
 Richard Rorty entry in International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences.
 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989).
 The Roots of Rorty’s Philosophy—Pragmatism Today (vol 2, Issue 1, Summer 2011).
 Pragmatism and Literature—Pragmatism Today (vol2, Issue 2, Winter 2011).