Tome 89, issue 1, January-March 2026
The Pittsburgh School in relation to Kant and Hegel
Gilles Marmasse & Samuel Vitel, Foreword
Raphaël Ehrsam, Kant in Pittsburgh: from the tribunal of reason to the tribunal of experience
John McDowell can rightly be presented as an heir to Kant. In this paper, I show how both his critique of the myth of the given and his conception of the activity of knowing explore the Kantian principle that intuitions without concepts are blind, as well as the Kantian view of rationality as a reflexive unification of the rules of understanding. I simultaneously highlight several distortions that McDowell introduces into Kant’s doctrine (i.e., conceiving of experience itself as a “tribunal”; refusing the distinction between appearances and things in themselves; advancing a theory of “second nature”).
Juliette Courtillé,The Kantian conception of sensory
Putnam and McDowell—A shared legacy?
In this article, we examine the conceptual and argumentative similarities between the views of John McDowell and Hilary Putnam and Kant’s conception of sensory experience. There are two reasons for this focus of analysis: First, rather than directly invoking Kant, Putnam (1994) uses McDowell to explain the relationship between the mind and the world. Putnam’s Kantian heritage regarding the nature and epistemic role of sensory experience therefore appears to stem primarily from McDowell. Second, Putnam’s later criticisms of McDowell’s position (2012, 2016) raise questions about how resilient the Kantian stance is in the face of such critique.
James R. O’Shea, Inner sense and apperception in Kant, Sellars, and the “Pittsburgh School”
What is now known as the ‘Pittsburgh School’ is partly known for the different ways in which its representatives adapted Kant’s central ideas. In this article, I examine how Sellars, R. B. Brandom, and J. McDowell each appropriated Kantian conceptions of ‘inner sense’ and ‘apperception’ in their own way. What is striking is the divergence of philosophical perspectives that emerged from this common core of ideas, illustrated here by the contrast between Sellars’ conceptions of internal sense and apperception and those of R. B. Brandom and J. McDowell.
Luca Corti, Hegel through a post-Sellarsian lens. The genesis and conceptual structure of the Anglo-American Hegel renaissance
This article reconstructs the origins of the Anglo-American Hegel renaissance, showing how a post-Sellarsian conceptual vocabulary rendered Hegel newly intelligible. It identifies the shared normative core of these interpretations and analyzes the theoretical tensions they produce, especially the dualism between nature and norm, as well as the hermeneutic selectivity that characterizes this paradigm.
Emmanuel Renault, Did Hegel support the thesis of the conceptual content of perception?
This article aims to evaluate the validity of John McDowell’s attribution of his thesis on the conceptual content of perception to Hegel, beginning by recalling the meaning of, and the reasons behind, McDowell’s claim. Hegel, for his part, distinguishes sensation, perception, and intuition, and we argue that his conception of the non-conceptual content of sensation distances him from McDowell. We also examine some arguments that have been put forward to draw Hegel closer to McDowell’s position. Ultimately, it appears that Hegel supports neither McDowell’s thesis nor the related thesis of discontinuity between animal and human cognition.
Ferdinand Perot, The autonomy of reason in Robert Brandom: a return to Hegelian idealism?
In this article, I argue that Robert B. Brandom’s pragmatism can be seen as a convincing re-actualization of Hegelian idealism, and of the principle of the absolute autonomy of reason on which it is founded. In his pragmatic conception of conceptual norms, reason is both immanent to the socio-historical contexts of its institution and transcendent vis-à-vis these same contexts. Far from reducing the norms of rationality to a set of given socio-historical facts, I argue that the social anchoring of reason, on the contrary, guarantees its absolute autonomy.
Samuel Vitel, The Pittsburgh School and the rehabilitation of idealism
This article examines the « Pittsburgh School », primarily represented by the work of Robert Brandom and John McDowell, arguing that their philosophical endeavours constitute a contemporary resurgence of post-Kantian idealism, notably in its Hegelian form. Against the « myth of the Given », they affirm that genuine knowledge requires conceptual mediation but resist the « mediation scepticism » that is often taken to follow from such a position. Idealism is no longer seen as antithetical to realism but rather becomes that which makes the latter intelligible.
Gilles Marmasse, Should we make the philosophies of the past relevant today? Some remarks inspired by Brandom’s interpretation of Hegel
This article examines the strengths and weaknesses of Robert Brandom’s reading of Hegel. Broadening the debate, it seeks to identify the respective orientations of readings that actualize a work of the past and those that aim at a historical reconstruction of the latter. The hypothesis put forward is that the actualizing perspective tends to appropriate ancient concepts, translating them into its own cultural framework, whereas historical reconstruction seeks to highlight the distance between our rationality and that expressed in the work under study. Two perspectives that, while not incompatible, are clearly distinct.
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Éric Weil, Philosopher avec Critique (par Jean-Michel Buée)
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Cartesian Bulletin LV