Yael Gazit

This article discusses John McDowell’s engagement with the history of philosophy and its relation to McDowell’s Gadamerian views. While McDowell often approaches the great philosophers of the past, and strongly criticizes others for their approach, he rarely reflects on this practice as a method or provides it with philosophical grounds. This lack of account stands out even more in light of McDowell’s appeal to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Hermeneutics. While McDowell develops his views as essentially Gadamerian, he does not appeal to Gadamer’s greatest contribution in the study of interpreting texts and past figures. In this article, I suggest a three-layered account of McDowell’s engagement with the history of philosophy, which examines McDowell’s actual approach to the past, reconstructs his conception of such an approach, and ties the two together with McDowell’s Philosophy as Gadamerian. By looking into McDowell’s reading of Wilfrid Sellars, and McDowell’s interpretational dispute with Robert Brandom, I show that the first two layers of practice and theory do not always coincide and argue that this consequently throws new light upon the third grounding layer and challenges some of McDowell’s core views.

Among his many contributions to philosophy, Carnap’s work also influenced the historiography of philosophy. In his Aufbau of 1928, he introduced the term ‘rational reconstruction’ (‘rationale Nachkonstruction’), which is now known as a central approach to the history of philosophy. Carnap’s own conception, though, had nothing to do with our engagement with the Mighty Dead. It was only later, when subsequent philosophers appropriated the term, that it entered the historiographical debate. In this chapter we sketch the development of the notion of rational reconstruction, ending with a brief reflection on our sketch.

In the past, Robert Brandom’s philosophy has provided fruitful grounds for the development of an approach to the history of philosophy. In A Spirit of Trust (2019), however, this approach takes a new form; one that corresponds to a shift of focus in Brandom’s philosophy, from his earlier inferentialism to its later developments in the thesis of rational recollection. This article aims to elucidate and explicate this new approach, which Brandom refers to as forgiveness. By looking into the thesis of rational recollection, the article examines the back-looking attitude that Brandom argues for and how it can be applied to past philosophy. To better understand the novelty of this approach as forgiveness, the article considers other names that Brandom ascribes to this process, which interestingly correspond to different genres in the historiography of philosophy. Lastly, the article discusses whether such a forgiving approach leaves room for criticism and mistakes.

This article suggests a change of perspective on philosophy’s engagement with its past. It argues that rather than the putative purport of giving life to the past philosopher’s work, philosophical engagement with the past gives life to one’s own. Drawing on the neo-pragmatist thesis of Robert Brandom, it suggests looking to what philosophers do when they attribute meaning to concepts and considering their engagement with the past as appropriation in consequence. By scrutinizing Robert Pippin’s opposing thesis of philosophical engagement with the past as dialogue, and carefully examining Brandom’s, the article suggests an account for appropriation that shows it to be non-dialogical, and hence unable to yield the fruits associated with this conception, but also insightful and rich with other philosophical values. Brandom and John McDowell’s dispute over the interpretation of Wilfrid Sellars provides an illustration of the proposed perspective and of those values.

Robert Brandom’s notion of historical rationality seeks to supplement his inferentialism thesis by providing an account for the validity of conceptual contents. This account, in the shape of a historical process, involves the same self-integration of Brandom’s earlier inferentialism and is similarly restricted by reciprocal recognition of others. This article argues that in applying the synchronic social model of normative discourse to the diachronic axis of engaging the past, Brandom premises a false analogy between present community and past tradition, which obscures the important differences between the two axes. This is explored by looking closely at how Brandom’s own engagements with the past exemplify his historical rationality. Taking its cue from Brandom’s critics, the article shows that Brandom’s own discourse with tradition is not, and cannot be, dialogical and, in accordance, that historical rationality is not, and cannot be, governed by the same social structure of inferentialism. The article concludes with the implications of such a claim on Brandom’s thesis as a whole and on the role of tradition in the process of normative change, in light of it.