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A Spirit of Trust

A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology
  • Robert B. Brandom
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2019

About this book

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.

Reviews

[A] masterpiece.
-- Slavoj Žižek Philosophy Now

Displays the swashbuckling speculation and hermeneutical ingenuity of the best continental philosophy together with the rigor of the best analytic work…[An] astonishing book. Brandom develops fundamentally original positions with implications for everything from narrative theory to the free will problem to the nature of the political state.
-- Crispin Sartwell Los Angeles Review of Books

Must now count as Brandom's most significant contribution to contemporary philosophy…[An] impressive book.
-- Stephen Houlgate Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

This long-awaited book has been thirty years in the making. Brandom’s A Spirit of Trust aspires to do for Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit what Strawson’s The Bounds of Sense did for Kant’s The Critique of Pure Reason: to transpose a seminal work of German Idealism into the terminological idiom and argumentative key of anglophone analytic philosophy—not only to render a past classic newly available to the present, but to transform the philosophical present through such a re-inheritance of its past.
-- James Conant, University of Chicago

A Spirit of Trust will be the book that finally moves analytic philosophy from its Kantian phase to its Hegelian phase. Brandom has succeeded in bridging both the history–systematic and the continental–analytic divides in contemporary philosophy. To say that this book is highly anticipated would be a gross understatement.
-- Dean Moyar, Johns Hopkins University

Brandom’s goal is to make Hegel explicable to a new audience, to make the importance of his philosophy plain and to further develop his own impressive body of work. He has succeeded, and his success throws up fascinating questions for both American philosophy and critical theory.
-- J. D. Evans Marx and Philosophy Review of Books

Topics

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    Frontmatter

    i
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  • Publicly Available

    Contents

    vii
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    Reference Abbreviations

    xiii
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    Introduction: A Pragmatist Semantic Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology

    1
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  • PART ONE. Semantics and Epistemology: Knowing and Representing the Objective World
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    1. Conceptual Realism and the Semantic Possibility of Knowledge

    35
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    2. Representation and the Experience of Error: A Functionalist Approach to the Distinction between Appearance and Reality

    63
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    3. Following the Path of Despair to a Bacchanalian Revel: The Emergence of the New, True Object

    87
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    4. Immediacy, Generality, and Recollection: First Lessons on the Structure of Epistemic Authority

    107
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    5. Understanding the Object / Property Structure in Terms of Negation: An Introduction to Hegelian Logic and Metaphysics in the Perception Chapter

    133
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    6. “Force” and Understanding—From Object to Concept: The Ontological Status of Theoretical Entities and the Laws that Implicitly Define Them

    169
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    7. Objective Idealism and Modal Expressivism

    198
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  • PART TWO. Normative Pragmatics: Recognition and the Expressive Metaphysics of Agency
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    8. The Structure of Desire and Recognition: Self-Consciousness and Self-Constitution

    235
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    9. The Fine Structure of Autonomy and Recognition: The Institution of Normative Statuses by Normative Attitudes

    262
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    10. Allegories of Mastery: The Pragmatic and Semantic Basis of the Metaphysical Incoherence of Authority without Responsibility

    313
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    11. Hegel’s Expressive Metaphysics of Agency: The Determination, Identity, and Development of What Is Done

    363
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    12. Recollection, Representation, and Agency

    422
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  • PART THREE. Recollecting the Ages of Spirit: From Irony to Trust
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    13. The History of Normative Structures: On Beyond Immediate Sittlichkeit

    469
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    14. Alienation and Language

    500
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    15. Edelmütigkeit and Niederträchtigkeit: The Kammerdiener

    547
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    16. Confession and Forgiveness, Recollection and Trust

    583
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    Conclusion: Semantics with an Edifying Intent: Recognition and Recollection on the Way to the Age of Trust

    636
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    Afterword: To the Best of My Recollection

    759
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    Notes

    771
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    Index

    793
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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
May 20, 2019
eBook ISBN:
9780674239067
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
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https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674239067
eBook ISBN: 9780674239067
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