Seminar with Tomasz Zarębski

Tomasz Zarębski from the University of Lower Silesia in Wrocław (Dolnośląska Szkoła Wyższa Edukacji Towarzystwa Wiedzy Powszechnej, DSWE) visits the Wittgenstein Archives in the period 2-27 May, 2006. In this context, a seminar is organized:

• Tuesday, 23 May, 14.15-16.00, Wittgenstein Archives, Aksis, Allégt. 27, meeting room, 1st floor: "Robert B. Brandom's Account of Logic against the Background of Analytic Philosophical Tradition"


Zarębski has given us the following summary of his lecture:

In my presentation I would like to focus on Robert B. Brandom’s approach to logic and rationality, trying to relate it to two opposing views on language in analytic philosophy: the constructivist one, on the one hand, and the descriptionist one, on the other. The former found natural languages unclear, imprecise and unsatisfactory for philosophical and scientific enterprise, thereby attempting to construct new formal language that would be precise, unambiguous and rational. The latter, conversely, regarded formal logic as something artificial to human reason and put stress on the relevance of natural language in our understanding of rationality; thereby trying rather to describe different uses and contexts of natural languages than to build another, formal one. In this background I would like to locate Brandom’s expressivist account of logic. I will argue that Brandom is much closer to the description than to the construction, indicating that in his conception reasoning is based, first and foremost, on our capacity for grasping and operating concepts, not on a capability to comply with logical structures. Formal logic plays only a secondary role in reasoning, being parasitic on original, practical inferences embedded in our practice of applying concepts. Its task consists in expressing these inferences in a clear and tidy way, elucidating them and “making them explicit.

Tomasz Zarębski is lecturer in philosophy at the University of Lower Silesia in Wrocław, Poland (Dolnośląska Szkoła Wyższa Edukacji Towarzystwa Wiedzy Powszechnej, DSWE), and has published "Od paradygmatu do kosmopolis" (Wrocław 2005), a study of Stephen E. Toulmin's philosophy.

Last change: 2005.5.9 by ap