ABSTRACT
Alienation is a key issue in Robert Brandom’s reading of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. First, it is the overarching concept of his reconstruction of the Geist chapter. Since Brandom rightly assumes that the conceptual structure of Absolute Spirit has emerged and the whole story of the book has already reached its conceptual end, it is fair to say that alienation is at the core of his whole interpretation of the second half of the Phenomenology. The chapter traces back Brandom’s understanding of alienation to his understanding of skepticism in the first and second parts of A Spirit of Trust. It argues that, once the distinction between Entauberung and Entfremdung is taken into account, the relations both between alienation and domination and between alienation and work, and consequently the relation between Spirit and nature, should be reconsidered in a way that puts into question the bootstrapping model that Brandom supports.
