Customer Reviews

Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a fascinating collection of essays. Essentially Brandom tries to excavate an underground tradition buried deep in the history of modern philosophy that spans from Spinoza to Sellars--a tradition that seeks to explain mindedness in terms of the ability to make inferences, and then seeks to present that ability as a kind of practical know-how. The best way to approach these essays is to think of them as filling in the details of the sketch of this tradition offered in his "Making it Explicit"--as making explicit the historical commitments contained in that work, if you will. To complain that they are insensitive to the historical contexts of the authors in question is to miss the point of the exercise (and to overlook Brandom's own remarks on this question). Most of the material here (which includes essays on Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel, Frege, Heidegger and Sellars) is not new. But having it all in one place is nice, and his introduction is definitely worth reading. In it Brandom provides an overview of his take on this tradition, as well as an interesting account of his own hermeneutical strategies and prejudices. His attempt to combine Gadamer with the account of de re and de dicto attitude ascriptions from "Making it Explicit" is certainly worth the price of admission. It should be noted that those who have not already read some of Brandom's work will probably find this pretty inaccessible. The claims he makes about the mighty dead are expressed in his own highly idiosyncratic vocabulary (this goes especially for the essays that were written later), and readers who are unfamiliar with it are likely to find what he says somewhat baffling. Like Sellars before him, Brandom treats the texts of the historical figures with which he engages as occasions to do philosophy. So readers can expect to wrestle here as much with Brandom's ideas as with the ideas of Hegel and Heidegger. Those looking for an introduction to his work should probably start with "Articulating Reasons" instead of this one. But if you've already read either that or "Making it Explicit," and want to dig deeper into his understanding of the tradition that posed the questions he's trying to answer, this book offers some great stuff.

This book is a great entry point into Brandom's vast and expanding philosophical system. I actually read it after Making it Explicit, Articulating Reasons, Between Saying and Doing, and Reason in Philosophy, and it allowed me to appreciate Brandom's thought from a whole new angle, the classic modern works all translated into his vocabulary. Of particular interest are the essays on thinkers Brandom does not discuss in his major publications, namely Spinoza, Leibniz and Heidegger.