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

Description

In a new retelling of the romantic rationalist adventure of ideas that is Hegel’s classic The Phenomenology of Spirit, Robert Brandom argues that when our self-conscious recognitive attitudes take Hegel’s radical form of magnanimity and trust, we can overcome a troubled modernity and enter a new age of spirit. Introduction : A pragmatist semantic reading of Hegel's Phenomenology -- Part One: Semantics and epistemology : knowing and representing the objective world. Conceptual realism and the semantic possibility of knowledge -- Representation and the experience of error : a functionalist approach to the distinction between appearance and reality -- Following the path of despair to a bacchanalian revel: the emergence of the second, true, object -- Immediacy, generality, and recollection : first lessons on the structure of epistemic authority -- Understanding the object / property structure in terms of negation: an introduction to Hegelian logic and metaphysics in the perception chapter -- "Force" and understanding-from object to concept: the ontological status of theoretical entities and the laws that implicitly define them -- Objective idealism and modal expressivism -- Part Two: Normative pragmatics : recognition and the expressive metaphysics of agency. The structure of desire and recognition : self-consciousness and self-constitution -- The fine structure of autonomy and recognition: the institution of normative statuses by normative attitudes -- Allegories of mastery: the pragmatic and semantic basis of the metaphysical incoherence of authority without responsibility -- Hegel's expressive metaphysics of agency: the determination, identity, and development of what is done -- Recollection, representation, and agency -- Part Three. Recollecting the ages of spirit : from irony to trust : The history of normative structures: on beyond immediate Sittlichkeit -- Alienation and language -- Edelmutigkeit and Niedertrachtigkeit: the Kammerdiener -- Confession and forgiveness, recollection and trust -- Conclusion: Semantics with an edifying intent : recognition and recollection on the way to the age of trust.