In Pursuit of Discovery: Pittsburgh School of Philosophy Seeks to Understand Understanding
Pitt Distinguished Professors of Philosophy Robert Brandom (seated) and John McDowell
Not many cities have a school of philosophical thought named after them. Pittsburgh does—though it could justly be called the University of Pittsburgh School of Philosophy. That would reflect the decades-long legacy of work that has made Pitt’s Department of Philosophy nationally and globally recognized. In the 2022 QS World University Rankings by Subject, the department was ranked fifth globally, ahead of the University of Oxford.
This philosophical heritage and the ongoing excellence of the Department of Philosophy rank among the most valuable treasures of the University of Pittsburgh.
That heritage includes work examining the relationships between mind and language and between the real NNand theoretical worlds. The department’s work builds on a methodology known as pragmatics, established in the 1950s and 1960s by Pitt professor Wilfrid Sellars. The methodology has come to be known as the Pittsburgh School.
Robert Brandom, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, offers some necessary history: “Administrators at Pitt realized in the late 1950s that they couldn’t compete with schools like Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania in the ‘best of’ lists. They decided to build just one department that would be on the list. They brought Wilfrid Sellars from Yale University and immediately became one of the most highly rated departments in the country.
“Universities all over the country adopted the model of building a department around one prominent scholar, and now there are world-class departments spread out all over the country. Pitt was the very first to create that model and is the envy of the world,” he says.
One could sum up the Pittsburgh School like this: the interactions with the world that cause humans to act, believe and feel are crucial for understanding knowledge, thought and language. It it not possible to understand them as abstractions.
As Brandom explains, “Language is the concrete foundation of what 19th-century German philosopher Georg Hegel called ‘Geist’ or thought. Our task is to understand ourselves as rational creatures—in other words, to understand understanding. To do that, we must acknowledge the human norms we use to understand each other as talking creatures. And to understand that is to understand us as thinking creatures.”
“We must acknowledge the human norms we use to understand each other as talking creatures. And to understand that is to understand us as thinking creatures.”