DOI: 10.25136/2409-8728.2020.11.34207

Abstract: This article examines the key provisions of philosophical concept of the American pragmatist, representative of Pittsburgh School Robert Brandom, described in the commentaries to Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit” (published in separate volume in 2019). It is demonstrated that rational reconstruction of Hegel's philosophy's conducted by Brandom was intended to revive the legacy of the classic, taking into account peculiarities and trends of development of the modern analytical philosophy. The specificity of Hegelian approach towards the analysis of experience of human consciousness, Brandom traces in “hypostasization of the conceptual” and gradual separation from all kinds of idealistic antirealist doctrines that contrapose being-for-consciousness-in-itself to being of things and “disengage” the subject of cognition from objects of the world. Brandom claims that reality itself, things in themselves, is conceptually articulated, and thus cognizable. The author reveals the theoretical-methodological difference between Hegel's interpretation of normativity (“recognitive model”) and Kant's subjectivist approach: according to Kant, institutionalization of the normative status is exhausted by the gesture of accepting such as an autonomous subject; in Hegel’s opinion, the essential condition for founding the status is, as interpreted by Brandom, socio-communicative mediation (“assignment” of status to the subject by his interlocutors, as well as recognition of his assertions by interagents and audience). The article reviews Brandom's arguments against the reduction of Hegelian master – slave dialectic to the inner conflict of individual self-consciousness (position of J. McDowell). The conclusion is made that “re-description” of Hegel conducted by the American philosopher is of radically anachronistic nature, and sheds light on the views of author of the commentaries (primarily his semantic pragmatism and holism), but not on the content of work he provides commentaries to.

DOI: 10.25136/2409-8728.2019.4.29938

Abstract: On the example of “ethnocentrism” of R. Rorty, this article analyzes one of the most controversial and discussible in the modern philosophical literature versions of deflationary solution of the problem of truth and rational substantiation of knowledge. Opposing the metaphysical hypostatization of truth, considering it a ”mere concept”, the American philosopher, nevertheless, concedes the possibility of using the predicate of truth in the negatively-limited, fallibilistic meaning – as a cautionary reference to the future plausible refutation. Analysis of the concept alongside the discussions unfolding around it, allow concluding that in the question about truth, Rorty does not move far beyond from the pragmatism of C. S. Pierce, as he thinks he does. Virtually, in his gnoseology Rorty leans on Pierce’s theory of truth as a “final faith of scientific community; he does not decline transensus, a transition from “worse”, less substantiated and valid knowledge to the “better”, more substantiated and valid. From the perspective of common (scientific, philosophical, political, moral, etc.) sense, which may imply only one thing – approaching the objective truth.

DOI: 10.25136/2409-8728.2017.11.24617

Abstract: American pragmatist R. Rorty is widely recognized as one of the most radical antirepresentationalists due to his criticism of the traditional Cartesian-Kantian epistemology. Rorty believes it is possible to scrutinize all human practice through the prism of linguistic (discursive) activity. Any pre-discursive dimension of life experience is straightforwardly ignored by him. An epistemic subject, in Rortyan version of pragmatism, is wholly deprived of a non-linguistic access to the outer or inner world; “language goes all the way down”, as he bluntly puts it. In spite of his verbal rejection of Kantian epistemology Rorty de-facto brings linguistic transcendentalism to its highest perfection: even the domain of our direct interaction with nonhuman reality turns out to be a subject to “the categories of language”. The analysis in this paper is based on the critical reading of Rorty’s later works (published from 1979 to 2007), including his enduring debates with “realist” opponents. The research applies the following methods: historical-descriptive method (in explicating Rorty’s philosophical views), rational reconstruction (in clarifying the theoretical assumptions that underlie the linguistic pragmatism), comparative analysis (in juxtaposing antirepresentationalism with other philosophical theories relevant to the subject matter)

DOI: 10.7256/2454-0757.2014.1.10343

Abstract: