ABSTRACT
The many parts of Robert Brandom’s A Spirit of Trust interlock in such an organic way that it seems manifestly unfair to single out a topic in isolation and spend a few pages trying to understand and assess it. Brandom interprets this speculative notion of negativity as “a process that is mediated by the relations of material incompatibility and consequence”. He calls Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s concept of determinate negation Hegel’s most fundamental conceptual tool, and it is such negation that he defines in terms of “material incompatibility and consequence,” and he insists that the general normativity of material inferences is irreducible to the normativity of formal principles alone. Brandom’s central idea is that determinate negation is a modal issue, a matter of alethic modalities, concerned with material modalities in reality of necessity, possibility, and impossibility.
