Charlie Huenemann, “Talking and trusting: Brandom’s A Spirit of Trust“
A Spirit of Trust is a work that Robert Brandom has been working toward for decades. It is a philosophical reconstruction of what he takes to be the central core of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. As Brandom sees the work, it is an attempt to answer the central problem of modernity, which is the challenge of taking our normative evaluations seriously in the face of powerful genealogical debunking arguments. Brandom (and Hegel, according to the interpretation) argue that by trusting in the rationality of our conversations, and holding one another accountable for our claims, we achieve a better understanding of one another, and of the world, and of our shared past that has led us to this point. Working together to try to understand the human experience, we carry ourselves into a spirit of both forgiveness and trust (which would be a damned sight better than whatever it is we are doing now).
I am still thinking through Brandom’s work, as both a work of interpretation and of original philosophy, and so my presentation will be a summary of Brandom’s argument, along with raising questions I would like to try to answer.