A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology
Forty years in the making, this long-awaited reinterpretation of Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit is a landmark contribution to philosophy by one of the world’s best-known and most influential philosophers.

In this much-anticipated work, Robert Brandom presents a completely new retelling of the romantic rationalist adventure of ideas that is Hegel’s classic The Phenomenology of Spirit. Connecting analytic, continental, and historical traditions, Brandom shows how dominant modes of thought in contemporary philosophy are challenged by Hegel.

A Spirit of Trust is about the massive historical shift in the life of humankind that constitutes the advent of modernity. In his Critiques, Kant talks about the distinction between what things are in themselves and how they appear to us; Hegel sees Kant’s distinction as making explicit what separates the ancient and modern worlds. In the ancient world, normative statuses—judgments of what ought to be—were taken to state objective facts. In the modern world, these judgments are taken to be determined by attitudes—subjective stances. Hegel supports a view combining both of those approaches, which Brandom calls “objective idealism”: there is an objective reality, but we cannot make sense of it without first making sense of how we think about it.

According to Hegel’s approach, we become agents only when taken as such by other agents. This means that normative statuses such as commitment, responsibility, and authority are instituted by social practices of reciprocal recognition. Brandom argues that when our self-conscious recognitive attitudes take the radical form of magnanimity and trust that Hegel describes, we can overcome a troubled modernity and enter a new age of spirit.

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A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology
Forty years in the making, this long-awaited reinterpretation of Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit is a landmark contribution to philosophy by one of the world’s best-known and most influential philosophers.

In this much-anticipated work, Robert Brandom presents a completely new retelling of the romantic rationalist adventure of ideas that is Hegel’s classic The Phenomenology of Spirit. Connecting analytic, continental, and historical traditions, Brandom shows how dominant modes of thought in contemporary philosophy are challenged by Hegel.

A Spirit of Trust is about the massive historical shift in the life of humankind that constitutes the advent of modernity. In his Critiques, Kant talks about the distinction between what things are in themselves and how they appear to us; Hegel sees Kant’s distinction as making explicit what separates the ancient and modern worlds. In the ancient world, normative statuses—judgments of what ought to be—were taken to state objective facts. In the modern world, these judgments are taken to be determined by attitudes—subjective stances. Hegel supports a view combining both of those approaches, which Brandom calls “objective idealism”: there is an objective reality, but we cannot make sense of it without first making sense of how we think about it.

According to Hegel’s approach, we become agents only when taken as such by other agents. This means that normative statuses such as commitment, responsibility, and authority are instituted by social practices of reciprocal recognition. Brandom argues that when our self-conscious recognitive attitudes take the radical form of magnanimity and trust that Hegel describes, we can overcome a troubled modernity and enter a new age of spirit.

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A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel's <i>Phenomenology</i>

A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology

by Robert B. Brandom
A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel's <i>Phenomenology</i>

A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology

by Robert B. Brandom

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Overview

Forty years in the making, this long-awaited reinterpretation of Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit is a landmark contribution to philosophy by one of the world’s best-known and most influential philosophers.

In this much-anticipated work, Robert Brandom presents a completely new retelling of the romantic rationalist adventure of ideas that is Hegel’s classic The Phenomenology of Spirit. Connecting analytic, continental, and historical traditions, Brandom shows how dominant modes of thought in contemporary philosophy are challenged by Hegel.

A Spirit of Trust is about the massive historical shift in the life of humankind that constitutes the advent of modernity. In his Critiques, Kant talks about the distinction between what things are in themselves and how they appear to us; Hegel sees Kant’s distinction as making explicit what separates the ancient and modern worlds. In the ancient world, normative statuses—judgments of what ought to be—were taken to state objective facts. In the modern world, these judgments are taken to be determined by attitudes—subjective stances. Hegel supports a view combining both of those approaches, which Brandom calls “objective idealism”: there is an objective reality, but we cannot make sense of it without first making sense of how we think about it.

According to Hegel’s approach, we become agents only when taken as such by other agents. This means that normative statuses such as commitment, responsibility, and authority are instituted by social practices of reciprocal recognition. Brandom argues that when our self-conscious recognitive attitudes take the radical form of magnanimity and trust that Hegel describes, we can overcome a troubled modernity and enter a new age of spirit.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780674976818
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Publication date: 05/01/2019
Pages: 856
Product dimensions: 6.60(w) x 9.30(h) x 2.40(d)

About the Author

Robert B. Brandom is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh and a Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy. He delivered the John Locke Lectures at the University of Oxford and the Woodbridge Lectures at Columbia University. Brandom is the author of many books, including Making It Explicit, Reason in Philosophy, and From Empiricism to Expressivism (all from Harvard).

Table of Contents

Reference Abbreviations xiii

Introduction: A Pragmatist Semantic Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology 1

I The Focal Topic: The Content and Use of Concepts 1

II The Strategy of Semantic Descent 4

III The Social Dimension of Discursiveness: Normativity and Recognition 9

IV The Historical Dimension of Discursiveness: Recollective Rationality 12

V Cognition, Recognition, and Recollection: Semantics and Epistemology, Normative Pragmatics, and the Historicity of Geist 19

Part 1 Semantics and Epistemology: Knowing and Representing the Objective World

1 Conceptual Realism and the Semantic Possibility of Knowledge 35

I Classical Representational Epistemology 35

II Genuine Knowledge and Rational Constraint 44

III A Nonpsychological Conception of the Conceptual 50

IV Alethic Modal and Deontic Normative Material Incompatibility 57

2 Representation and the Experience of Error: A Functionalist Approach to the Distinction between Appearance and Reality 63

I Introduction 63

II Two Dimensions of Intentionality and Two Orders of Explanation 66

III Two Kantian Ideas 67

IV Hegel's Pragmatist Functionalist Idea 68

V The Mode of Presentation Condition 72

VI The Experience of Error 75

VII The Two Sides of Conceptual Content Are Representationally Related 80

VIII Conclusion 85

3 Following the Path of Despair to a Bacchanalian Revel: The Emergence of the New, True Object 87

I The Emergence of the Second Object 87

II From Skepticism to Truth through Determinate Negation 94

III Recollection and the Science of the Experience of Consciousness 101

4 Immediacy, Generality, and Recollection: First Lessons on the Structure of Epistemic Authority 107

I Sense Certainty Introduced 107

II Two Senses of "Immediacy" 110

III A Bad Argument 115

IV First Good Argument: Classification 118

V Second Good Argument: Anaphoric Recollection 124

5 Understanding the Object / Property Structure in Terms of Negation: An Introduction to Hegelian Logic and Metaphysics in the Perception Chapter 133

I The Lessons of Sense Certainty 134

II Determinateness and Exclusive Negation 136

III Formal Negation and Two Orders of Explanation 142

IV Properties and Objects 148

V Two Metaphysical Roles of Objects 151

VI Ten Kinds of Metaphysical Differences 158

VII From Perception to Understanding 164

6 "Force" and Understanding-From Object to Concept: The Ontological Status of Theoretical Entities and the Laws that Implicitly Define Them 169

I Forces as Allegorical for Theoretical Entities 169

II Invidious Eddingtonian Theoretical Realism 176

III Holism and the "Play of Forces" 180

IV From Forces to Laws as Superfacts 188

V The "Inverted World" and Possible-World Semantics 192

7 Objective Idealism and Modal Expressivism 198

I Explanation and the Expression of Implicit Laws 198

II Objective Idealism 204

III "Infinity" as Holism 217

IV Expressivism, Objective Idealism, and Normative Self-Consciousness 224

Part 2 Normative Pragmatics: Recognition and the Expressive Metaphysics of Agency

8 The Structure of Desire and Recognition: Self-Consciousness and Self-Constitution 235

I The Historicity of Essentially Self-Conscious Creatures 235

II Identification, Risk, and Sacrifice 237

III Creatures Things Can Be Something For: Desire and the Triadic Structure of Orectic Awareness 240

IV From Desire to Recognition: Two Interpretive Challenges 243

V Simple Recognition: Being Something Things Can Be Something for Is Something Things Can Be for One 248

VI Robust Recognition: Specific Recognition of Another as a Recognizer 253

VII Self-Consciousness 258

VIII Conclusion 260

9 The Fine Structure of Autonomy and Recognition: The Institution of Normative Statuses by Normative Attitudes 262

I Normative Statuses and Normative Attitudes: A Regimented Idiom 262

II The Kantian Autonomy Model of the Institution of Normative Statuses by Normative Attitudes 269

III A Model of General Recognition 277

IV A Model of Specific Recognition 285

V The Recognitive Institution of Statuses, Subjects, and Communities 290

VI The Status-Dependence of Attitudes 298

VII Conclusion 305

10 Allegories of Mastery: The Pragmatic and Semantic Basis of the Metaphysical Incoherence of Authority without Responsibility 313

I Introduction: Asymmetrical, Defective Structures of Recognition 313

II The Subordination-Obedience Model 316

III Identification 326

IV The Practical Conception of Pure Independence 329

V The Struggle 332

VI The Significance of Victory 334

VII The Master-Servant Relationship 338

VIII The Metaphysical Irony at the Heart of Mastery 340

IX From Subjects to Objects 343

X Recognition and Cognition 347

XI The Semantic Failures of Stoicism and Skepticism 352

11 Hegel's Expressive Metaphysics of Agency: The Determination, Identity, and Development of What Is Done 363

I Looking Ahead: From Conceptual Realism and Objective Idealism to Conceptual Idealism 363

II Two Sides of the Concept of Action: The Unity and Disparity that Action Involves 374

III Two Models of the Unity and Disparity that Action Essentially Involves 380

IV Intentional and Consequential Specifications of Actions 384

V Practical Success and Failure in the Vulgar Sense: The Vorsatz/Absicht Distinction 398

VI Identity of Content of Deed and Intention 403

VII Further Structure of the Expressive Process by Which the Intention Develops into the Deed 410

12 Recollection, Representation, and Agency 422

I Hegelian vs. Fregean Understandings of Sense and Reference 422

II Retrospective and Prospective Perspectives on the Development of Conceptual Contents 432

III Intentional Agency as a Model for the Development of Senses 442

IV Contraction and Expansion Strategies 452

Part 3 Recollecting the Ages of Spirit: From Irony to Trust

13 The History of Normative Structures: On Beyond Immediate Sittlichkeit 469

I Epochs of Geist 469

II Immediate Sittlichkeit 477

III The Rise of Subjectivity 487

IV Alienation and Culture 493

14 Alienation and Language 500

I Introduction: Modernity, Legitimation, and Language 500

II Actual and Pure Consciousness 502

III Recognition in Language 506

IV Authority and Responsibility in Language as a Model of Freedom 514

V Pure Consciousness: Alienation as a Disparity between Cognition and Recognition 523

VI Faith and Trust 527

VII Morality and Conscience 538

15 Edelmütigkeit and Niederträchtigkeit: The Kammerdiener 547

I Two Meta-attitudes 547

II The Kammerdiener 550

III The Authority of Normative Attitudes and Statuses 554

IV Naturalism and Genealogy 560

V Four Meta-meta-attitudes 569

VI Looking Forward to Magnanimity 580

16 Confession and Forgiveness, Recollection and Trust 583

I Niederträchtig Assessment 583

II Confession 592

III Forgiveness 596

IV Recollection 600

V The Conditions of Determinate Contentfulness 610

VI Trust and Magnanimous Agency 621

VII Hegel's Recollective Project 628

Conclusion: Semantics with an Edifying Intent: Recognition and Recollection on the Way to the Age of Trust 636

I Edifying Semantics 636

II Geist, Modernity, and Alienation 639

III Some Contemporary Expressions of Alienation in Philosophical Theories 648

IV Three Stages in the Articulation of Idealism 666

V Recollection: How the Process of Experience Determines Conceptual Contents and Semantic Relations 675

VI From Verstand to Vernunft: Truth and the Determinateness of Conceptual Content 688

VII Normativity and Recognition 698

VIII Dimensions of Holism: Identity through Difference 707

IX Truth as Subject, Geist as Self-Conscious 712

X The Age of Trust: Reachieving Heroic Agency 726

XI Forgiveness: Recognition as Recollection 744

Afterword: To the Best of My Recollection 759

Notes 771

Index 793

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