Robert Brandom Hegel Lecture 1 "Knowing and Representing"
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- Опубликовано: 5 окт 2024
- Lecture 1 of 18
Robert Brandom lectures on Hegel from "A Spirit of Trust"
Lecture Series at the University of Leipzig (2015-2019)
Forschungskolleg Analytic German Idealism / Humboldt Foundation
Thank you so much for sharing these!
Recommendation: watch the first 17 min of Lecture 3 for a nice overview; then watch Lectures 1 & 2.
Thanks
Wonderful lecture! Many thanks to Professor Brandom. I can't help but think that Hegel had already answered most of the objections of postmodernism, and that we have had 50 years of conceptual regression. Hopefully lectures like these will get us back on track.
Great lecture, but I don’t think the Hegelian critique of Kant really holds up in the first place. I very clearly remember K. discussing exactly the kind of Cartesian stance that Brandon mentions. I don’t think that he overlooked that point at all. He very clearly separates appearance, which is the work of sensibility, from judgment which is the work of understanding. I’m left wondering if this was a misreading by Hegel or if it had somehow become a standard misreading of Kant that he was responding to. On the other hand, it does seem correct that judgment is bound up with sensibility in a quasi-temporal sense, but the faculties are definitely separate and he does distinguish appearance from judgment.
Hegel sometimes says stupid things concerning Kant and Fichte.
From my understanding, what Brandom is arguing here is not that both Kant and Descartes presents the exact same "two stage representational theory". Their overall philosophies are very clearly different ones, but remain of a similar kind, namely, of being a generally "two staged" one. In both cases, the two-stage concerns "a fundamental difference in intelligibility between appearances (representings, how things are for consciousness) and reality (representeds, how things are in themselves), according to which the former are immediately and intrinsically intelligible, and the latter are not". This is ultimately because of Hegel's (and Fichte's and Schelling's) rejection of the "gulf of intelligibility" instituted by Kant through his clear distinction between things as they appear for consciousness and things in themselves. Thus, there is still a distinction between our possibility of grasping something that is specifically attuned to us (the "appearence") and grasping reality as it is (the "noumena" or the things in themselves). In Descartes case, as Brandom himself puts it, "The result was a two-stage, representational story that sharply distinguished between two kinds of things, based on their intrinsic intelligibility. Some things, paradigmatically physical, material, extended things, can by their nature only be known by being represented. Other things, the contents of our own minds, are by nature representings, and are known in another way entirely. They are known immediately, not by being represented, by just by being had." The main difference as I understand it is that Kant advanced and made progress on Descartes' distinction precisely in relation to the points that you brought up, that is, for Kant, the intuitions of sensibility are not in themselves intelligible, but only in conjuction with the categories of the understanding. In this sense, there isn't a distinction anymore between what can be known "immediately" and what can only be known "mediately"; to be known in an intelligible sense is now, by definition, to already have this "normative" shape of the understanding, to be a function of a judgement. This represents Kant's clear advancement in relation to his distinction between Intuitions and Concepts, and I agree with you that he didn't overlook Descartes' distinction at all by means of said distinction. The point is that Brandom argues that, for Hegel (and arguably, in this specific sense, to Fichte and Schelling as well), Kant's position remained somewhat "two staged" precisely because the gulf was actualized from the form of 'things that can only be known "immediately" (thoughts in a general sense) and things that can only be known mediately (matter in a general sense)' to the form of 'things that can only be known because they are appearences for us (phenoumena) and things that cannot be known as they are in themselves (noumena)". One can argue whether these post-kantian idealists in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel are justified in their stance towards the place that Kant's "things in themselves" occupy in his theory, but then this would be a different matter altogether. But in what remains, this could arguably amount to a defense of the necessity of a two stage representation exactly as Kant himself did, for there would be no way for us to surpass this gulf
It's intriguing to me that Brandom repeatedly endorses 'the conceptual has no outer boundary' but rejects 'there is nothing but the text'. I wonder whether MacDowell may be offering him an opportunity to retrospectively rationally reconstruct Derrida as progressive.
@@dostoyevsky1222 I'm so glad to hear someone else say that de Saussure is a pragmatist. To me this was clear the moment I started to read the _Cours_.
how is that intriguing?