Preparing the Pittsburgh School (1980s)
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
The Constellation
In the 1980s, a group of philosophers formed at the University of Pittsburgh who combined Hegel, pragmatism, and analytic philosophy: Robert Brandom, John McDowell, and (as their forebear) Wilfrid Sellars. Their major works appeared only in the 1990s (Volume III), but the foundations were laid earlier.[1]
Sellars’ legacy: Sellars (1912-1989), already discussed in Chapter 5.5, taught at Pittsburgh and left behind a tradition of “inferential holism” — the idea that meaning is constituted by inferential relations (what follows from what), not by reference to objects.
Robert Brandom (b. 1950) came to Pittsburgh in 1976 and worked on a synthesis of Sellars, Wittgenstein, and Hegel. His dissertation, “Making It Explicit,” developed over the years into his monumental main work (1994). The basic idea: concepts are not labels for things but moves in a “game of giving and asking for reasons.” Whoever uses a concept commits themselves to inferences and acquires entitlements. This is social practice, not private representation.[2]
John McDowell (b. 1942) came to Pittsburgh from Oxford in 1986. His project was a reconciliation of “nature” and “mind” — against naturalism, which reduces mind to nature, but also against dualism, which separates them. His solution: “second nature” — formation (Bildung) through which human beings enter the “space of reasons.” This is Hegel’s Bildung (from the Phenomenology) reformulated analytically.[3]
Systematic Significance
The Pittsburgh School shows that the analytic tradition, through its own self-critique, arrived at insights that Hegel had anticipated. Holism (Quine), conceptual mediation (Davidson), social constitution (Kripke/Wittgenstein), inferential semantics (Sellars) — all of these are building blocks that Brandom and McDowell assembled into an analytic reading of Hegel.
This does not mean that Hegel “was right” and the analysts simply didn’t know it. It means: the analytic critique of Hegel was superficial — it hit a caricature, not Hegel’s actual insights. The deeper analytic work (Quine, Davidson, Kripke, the later Wittgenstein) led to structures that Hegel’s Logic had already explicated.
Preview of Volume III: The Pittsburgh School is treated in detail in Geschichte der Hegel-Rezeption, Band III, Kapitel 9 (geplant). There the focus is on the explicit Hegel renaissance: Brandom’s Making It Explicit (1994), McDowell’s Mind and World (1994), and the Pippin-Pinkard debate over metaphysical versus non-metaphysical readings of Hegel. The present chapter shows the prehistory — how the analytic self-critique prepared the ground.
On the Pittsburgh School, cf. Chauncey Maher: The Pittsburgh School of Philosophy, London: Routledge, 2012. ↩︎
Robert Brandom: Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment, Cambridge/MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. ↩︎
John McDowell: Mind and World, Cambridge/MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. ↩︎