title: Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas
author: Robert B. Brandom
description: This work is a formidable achievement that demonstrates deep historical knowledge and awesome hermeneutic and systematic philosophical powers that, in this degree, are conjoined at best in a handful of people alive. This is in every way a superior work of philosophy, and shows why Robert Brandom holds a singular position in the discipline worldwide. (Sebastian Rdl, Universitt Basel.)<br /><br />This book represents a new collection of papers by one of the most important systematic philosophical thinkers of our time. As such it will be welcomed by those already familiar with Brandom's thought. At the same time, by connecting his views to familiar historical themes, Brandom has provided what is, to my mind, the most accessible route into his often dauntingly complex ideas, a route strongly recommended to those new to his work. (Mark Lance, Georgetown University)<br /><br />[An] important book...<b>Brandom</b> is an important philosopher with astonishingly systematic scope. (Jon Cogburn <i>Journal of Value Inquiry</i> 2011-12-01)<br /><br /><b>Brandom</b> is one of the great, original thinkers of our era, and this book is vintage Brandom...Brandom demonstrates how some central ideas of the idealism of Kant and Hegel have retained their power to animate receptive and imaginative philosophical minds even today. (Arto Laitinen <i>Metapsychology</i> 2010-07-17)<br /><br /><i>Reason in Philosophy </i>provides the first systematic, comprehensive, and accessible introduction to the work of <b>Brandom</b>, one of the most influential philosophers working in metaphysics and epistemology today. This exciting collection of essays delivers a powerful, elegant argument for a version of a currently unfashionable view--a transcendentally inflected rationalism--and also provides readers with a mature philosopher's carefully reasoned, fully felt philosophical framework. (K. Doran <i>Choice</i> 2010-06-01)<br /><br /><b>Brandom</b>'s expertise ranges over a bewildering array of topics, from philosophical logic and semantics to cognitive science and political philosophy, and his ability to integrate positions in these areas within a single philosophical framework is remarkable. (Nicholas Smith <i>The Philosophers Magazine</i> 2010-04-01)
zlib_text: Reason in Philosophy
  
  Reason in 
  Philosophy
  Animating Ideas
  Robert B. Brandom
  The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 
  Cambridge, Massachusetts . London, En gland 
  2009
  
  Copyright © 2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College 
  All rights reserved 
  Printed in the United States of America
  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
  Brandom, Robert, 1950– 
  Reason in philosophy : animating ideas / Robert B. Brandom. 
  p. cm. 
  Includes bibliographical references and index. 
  ISBN 978-0-674-03449-5 (alk. paper) 
  1. Rationalism. 2. Reason. 3. Philosophy, Modern. I. Title.
  B833.B65 2009 
  149�.7—dc22   2008052244
  
  This one is for Barbara. 
  Thirty-six years of loving marriage make a ﬁne beginning.
  
  Contents
  Acknowledgments  ix
  Introduction  
  1
  part one
  Animating Ideas of Idealism: 
  A Semantic Sonata in Kant and Hegel
  one Norms, Selves, and Concepts  
  27
  two Autonomy, Community, and Freedom  
  52
  three History, Reason, and Reality  
  78
  part two
  Reason and Philosophy Today
  four 