Philosophy professor awarded $1.5 million in grants for work

Pitt professor Robert Brandom admits to spending a lot of time “staring into space, thinking… Pitt professor Robert Brandom admits to spending a lot of time “staring into space, thinking stuff up,” but apparently, he thinks up the right stuff.

Brandom, a University of Pittsburgh Distinguished Service Professor of Philosophy, is one of four recipients of the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This award, established in 2001, will provide Brandom with $1.5 million in grants, one of the largest grants given worldwide for individual academic achievement.

Brandom, who received his doctorate in philosophy from Princeton in 1977, has worked in Pitt’s philosophy department since 1976. He currently teaches courses about the German philosophers Georg Hegel and Gottlob Frege and on the philosophies of mind and language.

He explains that philosophy, particularly the study of how humans use language, is part of our “self understanding,” adding that people are “interested in everything from what makes language possible to what language makes possible.”

Brandom is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and served as a Fellow of the Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Studies at Stanford University from 2002 to 2003. He has written six books and numerous articles on the philosophies of language, logic and the mind, but he is, perhaps, most renowned for his 1994 book, “Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment,” which explains the connections between mathematical and anthropological studies of languages. He is currently working on a book entitled “The Spirit of Trust,” an analysis of Hegel’s “The Phenomenology of Spirit.”

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation released a statement describing Brandom as “one of the most creative philosophers of language and mind working today. “Making It Explicit,” [Harvard University Press, 1994], his first book, is regarded as a leading contribution to understanding the nature of norms, rules, and commitments in thought and action – one of the most pressing problems in philosophy and the social sciences, and has been compared to landmark works from the previous generation of philosophers.”

Brandom explained that he plans to use the funds from the award on several projects, including hiring a professional archivist to catalog the papers of Wilfrid Sellars, whom he described as “the Pittsburgh philosopher” and “one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century.” Sellars worked at Pitt from 1963 until his death in 1989 and wrote “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.” By organizing these works, which are now in the Archive of Scientific Philosophy at Hillman Library, Brandom hopes to ready them for scholarly use.

“His presence in the philosophy department, more than anything else, marked us as a world-class department,” Brandom said of Sellars.

Brandom said that he hopes to use part of the award money to bring visiting lecturers here to Pitt. He will also use some of the funds to take three years off from his administrative and undergraduate teaching responsibilities to prepare for the John Locke Lectures he will give at Oxford University in 2006. This lecture series, entitled “Saying and Doing,” will focus on the “contemporary hard-core philosophy of language,” he said. He added that he also hopes to use some of the grant money to bring the John Locke Lectures here to Pitt for his colleagues and his post-doctoral students to enjoy.

“I have spent my entire career in the philosophy department at the University of Pittsburgh – a department that has consistently been recognized as one of the top five in the nation,” Brandom said. “The challenge is to find ways to use the money not only to further my own research, but the institutions that nurtured it.”

The other 2003 award recipients include Roger S. Bagnall, professor of classics and history at Columbia University; Anthony Grafton, Henry Putnam Professor of History at Princeton University, and Christopher Ricks, Warren Professor of the Humanities at Boston University.