Brandom

8/25/2008

Part I:

1)Q: Why care about Hegel? A: Contemporary Anglophone situation.

a)Sellars: Aims to move analytic philosophy from its Humean to its Kantian phase.

Rorty on me: Aims to move analytic philosophy from its incipient Kantian to its eventual Hegelian phase.

What would it mean to do this?

b)Empiricism:

Four phases of empiricism:

i)Traditional Early Modern British Empiricism-Naturalism.

ii)Classical American Pragmatism

iii)Logical Empiricism

iv)Modal Naturalism

Three phases of modal revolution in logic, semantics, and metaphysics:

  1. Kripke’s completeness proofs for modal logic.
  1. Intensional semantics
  2. Semantic metaphysics (NN).

c)Kant: Three big Kantian ideas:

  1. His semantic turn. (Last three phases of empiricism already follow Kant in this, albeit with some backsliding.)
  1. Following out that idea, his categorial turn.
  2. His normative turn. (Pragmatists had this.)

d) Hegel: [6 of Hegel’s Big Ideas are retailed in Part II.]

2)Two contemporary Wittgensteinean problems concerning conceptual or intentional normativity (cf. Kant’s big move):

a)Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s problem: determinateness.

b)How to understand the rational bindingness of conceptual norms, once their radical contingency (on details of our embodiment, training, and history—both communal-traditional and individual-pedagogic) is appreciated.

3)Story of “Sketch of a Program for a Critical Reading of Hegel”:

4)On the issue of systematicity, and the potential viability of “cafeteria Hegelianism,” contra Rolf-Peter Horstmann.

Part II:

What would it be to make the Hegelian move from this Kantian perspective?

Hegel’s Big Ideas:

5)HBI #1: The social nature of the normative

6)HBI #2: Reciprocal recognition as the structure of the social

7)HBI #3: A conception of the conceptual

8)HBI # 4: Semantic/Conceptual Holism

9)HBI # 5: Idealism: objective, conceptual, absolute

10)HBI #6: Intentionality: expressive and representational, and the relations between them.

11)HBI #7: Modernity and the 3 phases of human development

Part III:

Read the Phenomenology in the first two weeks (i.e. finish it in time for the third meeting of the course).Reading as below suggests the following permissible omissions:

a)72 §s from Preface.

b)102§s from Observing Reason

c)99§s from Religion

d)for a total of 273§s of a total of 808§s, which is omitting just a third of the book. That leaves 535§s to read in two weeks.

e)For a still more condensed read, the first time through skip or just skim:

i.§§135-164 on Force, Law, and Infinity.

ii.§§198-229 on Stoicism, Skepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness.

iii.§§488-537 on Culture, and Faith.

iv.§§582-594 on Absolute Terror.

Outline of Week 1 08-8-25 c102/01/2019