‘A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology’ by Robert Brandom Reviewed by J. D. Evans

Kant initially argued that reason cannot establish the reality and nature of God, and then, in his Critique of Practical Reason, he went on to propose that it is only in moral experience that such knowledge can be grounded, for the knowledge we have of ourselves as moral beings is inexplicable

whereas Hegel understood his philosophical approach as primarily descriptive, Kierkegaard and Marx borrowed an essentially Hegelian conception of selfhood but used it prescriptively. However, as each developed his parallel criticism of Hegel’s idealism, freeing his conception of selfhood from its conservative formulation, what had once been imagine

If Hegel suffered from some of the problems latent within Western thought, he was also the most developed repository of its promise.

Reality is thus a vast and complex totality of rational concepts

Philosophy, almost by definition, is preoccupied with our craving after some form of certainty or knowledge, a desire to find a once-and-for-all basis of understanding the world. That has traditionally led Western philosophers to pursue a foundation for knowledge. For something to qualify as a foundation for knowledge, that something must somehow b