ABSTRACT
In the Introduction to the Phenomenology, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel says his project is to describe a succession of shapes of consciousness, with one giving way to another until we reach Absolute Knowing. Robert Brandom acknowledges that, but in his treatment of the Introduction he almost totally ignores the succession of shapes. Brandom says the idea of semantic metaconcepts is “one of the founding Big Ideas of German Idealism”. He thinks the idea is first exemplified in Immanuel Kant’s categories, which he thinks are an inspiration for Hegel’s conception of logical concepts. For Brandom’s Kant, to judge is to undertake a commitment, a normative move that must be understood as part of a package with what one thereby makes oneself responsible for doing. In judging, one makes oneself responsible for “rationally integrating the new commitment one undertakes with one’s prior commitments so as to yield a constellation of doxastic commitments that exhibits the sort of rational unity distinctive of apperception”.
