A Tune Beyond Us, Yet Ourselves” Robert Brandom at Columbia-NYU March 30, 2024, "Live." Questions.

A Tune Beyond Us, Yet Ourselves: Reasons and Conceptual Realism
One of the founding concerns of German Idealism is Kant’s interrogation of the intelligibility of the idea of conceptual knowledge of a nonconceptual world. After a sketch of the historical context in which this question arises, I offer a nonpsychological conception of the conceptual, in terms of reasons, and show how it allows us to recruit some of the latest work in truthmaker formal semantic theories and bilateral normative pragmatic theories to frame a satisfying conceptual realism in response to Kant’s challenge. Text available at sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/

[@SerfOnEarth]

Thank you for publishing this talk Professor Brandom. Thank you especially for the first 30 minutes, your historical overview was incredibly helpful and interesting!

[@Steve-lb6fd]

I am very excited about your new book, Professor Brandom. I am following the current developments with great interest and send you greetings from Germany

[@methdolar2258]

Thank you for posting, Professor. Greetings from Portugal

[@Amgd212]

Thank you.

[@edwardj3070]

This hard distinction between "mere" sentience and discursive awareness seems a fiction. Animals don't use language as we do but they are clearly capable of more than merely registering data. The essential concept is what it's like to be a living conscious being.

[@kmerczerwony1739]

It doesn't really matter whether animals are paradigmatic cases of "merely conscious" beings. That's, probably, as you say, quite far from truth (but it also depends on what animals we're speaking about). The true gap is between purposive behavior (which includes animal movement), normatively guided practice, discursive thought etc. and phenomena that demand merely natural (paradigmatically, mechanical) explanation. These are two incommensurable modes of viewing various phenomena and, in fact, you could give a normative explanation of various perfectly natural phenomena, like rain falling, rivers flowing etc. (this is typical of animistic religions). But this mode of comprehension is mostly unjustified and useless in such cases. Only cognitively sophisticated creatures, like ourselves (and other intelligent animals), can be usefully comprehended via rationalization. The point is that one mode of comprehension is irreducible to the other.

[@edwardj3070]

@@kmerczerwony1739 very good but that isn't the distinction that the philosopher is making here. it's sentience vs sapience. or, in the words of his hero Hegel, "Spirit" is essentially and uniquely human... and I am questioning this as a long standing unjustified bias of most civilizations.

[@kmerczerwony1739]

@@edwardj3070 I don't think Hegel ever says that. From what I know, he was a huge fan of Aristotle's ideas about the mind. And according to Aristotle, plants and animals also can be said to have minds.

[@edwardj3070]

@@kmerczerwony1739 it hardly needs stating. "Spirit" is not the same thing as "mind"

[@kmerczerwony1739]

@@edwardj3070 In some translations, it is. But I'm really referring to what Aristotle called the "soul" and what we would nowadays call the "mind". Hegel, as far as I know, discussed these topic under the label of "Subjective Spirit", so your claim is wrong.