ABSTRACT
A new form of systematic philosophy will be found which has nothing whatever to do with epistemology but which nevertheless makes normal philosophical inquiry possible. While Robert Brandom does not have any foundationalist epistemologist ambitions, he does not take his philosophy of language to be disconnected from the traditional concerns of modern philosophy, which he takes, like Richard Rorty, to revolve around the notion of representation, but, unlike him, to be of a semantic rather than epistemological nature. Brandom’s philosophy is a hegelian philosophy of the conceptual. It is also a pure philosophy of language. Brandom brings his philosophy of language into contact with a theory of modernity in his reading of the Spirit chapter of the Phenomenology, which he takes to have “the advent of modernity” as its main topic.
