This is by far the best book about Rorty on the market, however it is certainly at the more technical end of the spectrum. Since Rorty's own prose elsewhere is frequently accessible to a wide audience, the prospective reader of this must be forewarned that the essays by his challengers and his responses are all more technical than much that he has written recently.

On the other hand the quality is high throughout, with fewer "cheap shots" by his opponents than in other collections about him, and much material that is really first rate. Even though the book is centered on Rorty and his responses, the quality is high enough that it really is a dialogue on the issues that he has been concerned with, and which are quite central to philosophy today.

If your taste for Rorty is not just for the lighter fare and you have some background in philosophy to bring to this, then this is richly rewarding.

Take the single most entertaining and engaging philosopher that the academy can today boast, add a few colleagues who have pointed (and sometimes passionate) arguments to pursue with him and serve at the hands of one of his protégés - and you have Rorty and His Critics edited by Robert B Brandom.

This book is very stimulating, enormously erudite and not a little complicated. Here Rorty is hauled over the hot coals and its his task to defend himself against (and, occasionally, to further expedite) the arguments of his interlocutors; these figures include such heavyweights as Habermas, Davidson, Dennett, and Jacques Bouveresse. They argue and debate back and forth over various things that the interlocutors have at issue with Rorty. These include the status of "truth" as against "justification before ones peers", the supposed inescapability from "reality" and, in the best piece from the book, written by Bjorn Ramberg, what a "Post-Ontological Philosophy of Mind" might be and, indeed, might lead to. In response to this latter piece Rorty seems to bend his pragmatic line just a bit closer to the realist one in what I hope might become a classic quote of his: "What is true in pragmatism is that what you talk about depends not on what is real but on what it pays you to talk about. What is true in realism is that most of what you talk about you get right." The book begins with a helpful introduction by the editor (a former graduate student supervised by Rorty with his own chapter engaging Rorty in the book as well) and a paper by Rorty which argues that justification is more useful than "truth" since at least you can recognise the former when you have it (and what you can't recognise when you have it is useless anyway).

The collection of questions as arguments put to Rorty and his responses seems, to me, to make Rorty work at his thinking. It makes him explicate and also explain his pragmatic turn of thought in response to a new set of papers and I, for one, am thankful for that. The book is hard going. Those not used to philosophical debate or microscopically logical argument where you can trap your opponent in seeming errors which undercut her thesis are going to find themselves quickly caught up in something which seems to be overpowering them. This is a book that should be read at leisure, poured over, taken in deeply and mused upon. It will require not a little effort. At the end of the process Rorty still does not think that there is a "Reality" out there for us to get right "Because there are no norms for talking about it". But I, for one, am glad that I have had the opportunity to read this book and it has made me sharpen up my own thinking too.

PoSTmodERnFoOL

I am not a big fan of Rorty's work, but this volume is excellent. It contains articles by top-notch philosophers (with Rorty's responses) that hits on topics ranging from truth and objectivity to epistemology and pragmatism.

I consider the most important articles as the following: Davidson, "Truth Rehabilitated," Putnam, "RR on Reality and Justification," (excellent); McDowell, "Towards Rehabilitating Objectivity," (excellent); Brandom, "Vocabularies of Pragmatism," M. Williams, "Epistemology and the Mirror of Nature," Conant, "Freedom, Cruelty, and Truth: Rorty versus Orwell."

I highly recommend this anthology.

I do not understand why it is always said that Sellars' language was so difficult. I found his philosophical style quite straight-on. Unfortunately, Sellars' main work is punctuated by some passages of superficial and/or incorrect reasoning, at which passages some may assume that they do not understand Sellars' argumentation - though it "has to be profound" (because of Sellars' reputation). The most important issue in this essay is the impossibility of reporting sense impressions without using language (with all implications that come along with that), and the repercussions of this circumstance on the philosophy of logical empiricism in its early stage (though Sellars obviously thinks his ideas impact on all forms of empiricism, which is not true). Along that line, Sellars has many good points that should be considered in the philosophy of science and in common sense reasoning, yet his reputed final dismantling of the "myth" of the given never takes place; in Sellars intentions, maybe, but his arguments are a far cry from being a stringent refutation. They are simply too superficial and too colloquial for that. (Cf. Putnam's model-theoretic arguments against realism, for a contrast.) What is really unfortunate for Sellars' essay is that, in this edition, it is framed by Rorty and Brandom. The philosophical humorist Rorty has contributed a foreword in an attempt to assimilate Sellars serious philosophical project into his radical-relativist historicizing outlook of philosophy, thus completely misleading the unknowing reader. The bright, but misguided, Brandom offers a study guide, which is no study guide, but an attempt to direct the reader at those aspects of Sellars' essay, which Brandom's own inferentialist philosophy is supposed to stem from. Unfortunately, these aspects are exactly the most questionable. So, while Sellars' essay is a profitable classic of analytic philosophy, the reader should be warned to read Rorty's foreword and Brandom's study guide cautiously and critically and to thoroughly consider, if these really reflect Sellars' essay correctly.

I have come back to this essay be Sellars again and again for over thirty years, and have never failed to impressed and inspired. Sellars can always get me to think at a deeper level than I'm used to. Second only perhaps to Wittgenstein in influence, Sellars is a philosopher's philosopher: understanding him requires a thorough grounding in the history of philosophy, and this essay in particular takes it for granted that you understand 20th century empricism and "sense data" theories pretty well. Even so, the writing style can be both dense and difficult, but reading it aloud can untangle any number of tricky passages. If you're not quite so well versed in history of philosophy, a similar critique can be found in J.L. Austin's "Sense and Sensibilia," which is more accessible but not nearly as profound. In the course of showing the futility of finding incorrigibile foundations for empirical knowledge in sense experience, Sellars simultaneously develops a strictly behavioristic psychology that legitimizes all the goodies, all the mental vocabulary, that folks like Skinner forbade. A tour de force unequalled in 80 years. Bob Brandom's explicatory essay is very helpful, and untwists several tricky knots in the text.

"Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" is an essential epistemological text of the twentieth century. It is difficult: each sentence is difficult. Sellars is said to have shown the existence of a private language by writing in one. The guide by Brandom does not much clarify and simplify the argument of Sellars for two reasons. It is impossible to do this. And Brandom wants to and does contribute significantly to Sellars scholarship. Sellars writes for the professional philosopher. If you plan to be such, or if you want to encounter philosophy at its most profound, you should study the book.

It's now over 1 1/2 years since I first read "Making It Explicit" and Brandom's theory has not ever proven to be useful for me. Except for Brandom's short (which means, by the standards of this book, several pages) remarks about "canonical designators" (which are somewhat nifty, but quite independent from his overall theory; which may be the reason...), not once did Brandom's work ever help me solve any philosophical problems. Needless to say that Brandom's semantics for logic never ever helped solve any problems in formal logic. Considering the tedious reading, the ridiculously low given-information/rhetoric ratio in 750 pages, and the lack of fruitfulness, I can now say, that "Making It Explicit" was one of the worst philosophical books I have read.

Having plowed through several hundred pages of this book, I simply concluded that there was nothing here that had not already been pointed out by Wittgenstein, Frege, Sellars, Quine, etc.--the very philosophers who are referenced constantly but never coherently brought together or successfully reframed into Brandom's project. In short, a lot of rhetorical hot air, badly in need of editing. In hope, I tried Brandom's slimmer explication of inferentialism, and again was profoundly disappointed. There's no there there.

Brandom deals with a number of outstanding problems in philosphy of language, epistemology, and philosophy of mind as these came to be construed by several generations of analytic philosophy beginning with Frege and continuing through Quine, Davidson, and Dummett. His solutions fall out of a Sellarsian theory grounded in the idea that meaning, inference, and epistemic justification are grounded in norms governing social interactions and practices. Brandom's treatment of standard questions of reference which have plagued us since Russell are particularly original and ingenious. Like the rest of his themes, this account is developed in detail with admirable rigor and honesty. Difficult but indespensible reading.