Robert Brandom was born in New York in 1950. He completed undergraduate studies at Yale, and wrote his doctoral thesis at Princeton University under the direction of Richard Rorty. He is currently the Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, where he has been a member of the philosophy faculty since 1976. Brandom is the author of four books, most notably Making It Explicit (henceforth MIE), and recently delivered the John Locke Lectures at the University of Oxford, entitled “Between Saying and Doing” (BSD). This book aims to provide a lucid introduction to Brandom's philosophy to date.

There are many reasons not to write such an introduction at this moment in time. Works of this nature are usually undertaken towards the end of a thinker's career, to provide a retrospective narrative that either outlines the development of the philosophy over time, or to reveal systematicity between parts of which the author was not consciously aware at first publication. This, however, does not apply to Brandom. First, he is relatively young, and at a stage when he is treated more as “the next big thing” than the finished product. Secondly, unlike many works rooted in the analytic tradition, Brandom's masterwork is a self-aware attempt at metaphysical system-building. Thirdly, Brandom's post-MIE writings, especially some of the essays in his Tales of the Mighty Dead (TOMD), already show signs of significant development of that system.