A Spirit of Trust

Forty years in the making, this long-awaited reinterpretation of Hegels The Phenomenology of Spirit is a landmark contribution to philosophy by one of the worlds 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 Hegels 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 Kants distinction as making explicit what separates the ancient and modern worlds. In the ancient world, normative statusesjudgments of what ought to bewere taken to state objective facts. In the modern world, these judgments are taken to be determined by attitudessubjective 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 Hegels 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.