ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to share Robert Brandom’s view that Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s idealism is fundamentally an inferentialism, and to agree that action is the key concept for understanding Hegel’s philosophy. It focuses on the relation of realism and idealism, which roughly tracks Brandom’s semantic treatment of reference and sense. Brandom gives to the more radical idealist component of Hegel’s view the name of conceptual idealism, which he formulates as an “explanatory asymmetry”. The conceptual idealism and conceptual realism turn out to be mutually supporting, for “a realist commitment is implicit in practically acknowledging the representational dimension of concept use. The chapter also aims to raise questions about how three elements of Brandom’s view impact the conceptual realism–objective idealism–conceptual idealism triad. Hegel’s philosophy is an ethical idealism, and his theory of value is crucial for understanding his metaphysics as well as his practical philosophy.
