ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Brandom's conception of discursive intentionality as original intentionality, why he treats the intentionality of animals and infants as derived intentionality, and the role of reliable differential responsive dispositions (RDRDs) in perception and action. Brandom's rationalistic pragmatism is nevertheless too uncritically accepting of the Enlightenment world-picture for it to not count as a regression from the self-criticisms of the Enlightenment that people find in German Idealism and in American Pragmatism. The chapter reconstructs and assesses the McDowell-Dreyfus debate in order to show just why an adequate account of human mindedness requires taking seriously the phenomenology of embodiment, but without turning phenomenology itself into a new version of the Myth. McDowell describes his project as an attempt to vindicate 'minimal empiricism'. In more recent work McDowell argues that his defense of minimal empiricism requires 'transcendental empiricism', which first emerges in the 1998 Woodbridge lectures as a further development of Sellars's criticism of classical empiricism.
