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

Description

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. 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.