ABSTRACT
Robert Brandom’s book on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is a very impressive achievement, full of interesting ideas which will start new and fruitful chains of enquiry. Hegel tackles the dead-end nature of the Cartesian approach in the introduction to the Phenomenology, where he shows up the inadequacy of theories of knowledge as instrument or medium. As Brandom argues, he places himself firmly as a successor of Immanuel Kant, whose starting point is the judgment, the conceptual characterization of the objects of experience. From that point on, the way in which experience can force conceptual change becomes understandable, and Brandom works this out with great clarity and brio. In the Phenomenology, Hegel saw the problem as residing in a unified negative will of the Revolutionary government to destroy all the institutions of the Ancien Régime.
