Ray Brassier - Sophistry, Suspicion, and Theory

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Self-transcribed from the recording's audio/video with Whisper ASR, then drawn from the frozen curation of the CCRU oral archive. The identifiers below fingerprint the exact source transcript files.

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Adjudicated APPROVED 2026-07-11 (basis: owner ruling 2026-07-11: institutional recordings released except fee-charging course content; lane recent-institutional -> recent-institutional-released). Series: standalone. Source: audio original (.mp3).

Timestamped map

These jump targets come from timestamps preserved in the source transcript, so they work as navigational anchors rather than editorially invented section labels. Timings are approximate — they mark where a passage begins, not exact word timing.

• 00:00:00

  Well, thanks very much to Nathan and Petar and everyone else who's helped organise it. I'm very happy to have been invited. I think there will be a kind of, hopefully, a continuity between some of the things I say and some of the issues discussed by Alberto, or at least, hopefully, I'll try to kind of forge some kind…

• 00:08:46

  So the target... Now, I think, why is Nietzsche not alongside Marx and Freud? Well, because there's a sense in which Nietzsche's genealogical enterprise challenges the very possibility, the very conditions of theorising as such. Genealogy, then, would be the sceptical exacerbation of theory. It marks the point…

• 00:15:49

  This is what inferentialism is, okay. Brandom is an inferentialist. Inferentialism defends the primacy of material inference over formal inference, as the minimal or non-normative core of rationality. Okay. What does this mean? It's an attempt to kind of, first, it's a kind of an extension of Kantian's discursive…

• 00:23:45

  So, the first philosophical kind of understanding of normativity is that the objectivity of norms is undermined by the realization that these norms are fundamentally constituted by our beliefs and desires, by our attitudes towards them. So in other words, modernity begins with the primacy of subjective normative…

• 00:30:36

  two-stage semantics. Basically. Which assumes that you can... there's a way of like... that you can somehow dissociate the fixation of semantic content from the epistemic adjudication of whether or not these contents apply to the world, to the empirical domain. And this is what he calls semantic naivety. So, semantic…

• 00:37:34

  Okay, so this is what objective idealism means, according to Brandom. It means that the conditions of objectivation, and therefore of theorization, including the critical articulations of reasons and causes, including saying that a subjective attitude is causally determined by an object in the world, presuppose…

• 00:45:10

  All it can do is hold these norms accountable to their own implicit criteria, which is the idea of rationality, by rendering explicit both their conceptual inconsistencies and their practical incompatibilities. And in doing so, according to Brandom, it would exert the minimum degree of discursive pressure required…

• 00:52:50

  There's no point in me kind of blabbering on it, so... APPLAUSE