Tom Rockmore

On reading Hegel

Abstract New readings have recently been offered by Frederick Beiser and
Robert Brandom of Hegel, a notoriously difficult writer. I believe that both
Beiser and Brandom go astray in reading Hegel otherwise than how he
reads others, that is, in terms of the internal development of their theories
in response to philosophical problems with which they were concerned as
opposed to other, external concerns. Beiser reads Hegel’s position in the
context of German idealism in order to refute it and Brandom reads it in
the context of analytic philosophy to learn from it. I will be recommend-
ing an alternative reading of Hegel’s position in the context of German
idealism in order to learn from it. I believe we cannot magically detach
Hegel from idealism in order to learn from, or even to understand, his
position. But I also believe we need to interpret German idealism differ-
ently in order to grasp Hegel’s contribution.
Key words Frederick Beiser · Robert Brandom · G. W. F. Hegel · idealism ·
Immanuel Kant · realism

Hegel remains an author of legendary difficulty, as hard to understand

as anyone in the Western philosophical tradition. The fact that books
on Hegel are currently emerging from the press faster than even the most
diligent student can read them indicates that an increasing number of
thinkers are interested in his ideas; not, however, that the quality of the
Hegel discussion is better than before.
The difficulties in reading Hegel are more easily indicated than alle-
viated. One, which affects those who read his writings in English, is the
often dubious quality of Hegel translations. Wallace’s rendering of the
Encyclopedia Logic is a contender for the prize as the worst translation
of any major philosophical text. Another concerns our grasp of the
wider historical context and specifically philosophical contexts in which
Hegel wrote. As these contexts recede into the past, it becomes harder
not easier to comprehend Hegel’s theories against the background in

PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM • vol 33 no 1 • pp. 55–66

PSC
Copyright © 2007 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) and
David Rasmussen
www.sagepublications.com DOI: 10.1177/0191453707071393

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 33 (1)
which they emerged. A third difficulty lies in Hegel’s immense grasp of
the entire history of philosophy, to which he reacts in the course of
formulating his own position, which, for that reason, cannot be
mastered merely on immanent grounds. A fourth difficulty lies in the
tendency to provide extrinsic readings of Hegel in terms of other
problems or theories instead of approaching his position immanently,
as he approached other positions, in terms of the problems with which
he was himself wrestling.
The problem of how best to approach Hegel’s writings is solved in
very different ways in recent discussion by Frederick Beiser and Robert
Brandom. Both approaches are problem-driven, more distantly in
Beiser’s reading of Hegel, more directly so in Brandom’s. Brandom
approaches Hegel in working out an inferentialist alternative to formal
semantics. Beiser, who notes that much of the story of German idealism
has been told from Hegel’s perspective, approaches Kant in terms of the
problem of what he calls the struggle against subjectivism. Hegel figures
heavily, but mainly negatively, in Beiser’s account. He claims that
German idealism is a story about the progressive de-subjectivization of
the Kantian legacy1 and that there is not a single Hegelian theme that
cannot be traced back to his predecessors in Jena.2 According to
Brandom, whose view of Hegel is more favorable, the latter employs a
pragmatic approach to conceptual norms in adopting a rationalist form
of so-called Enlightenment expressivism, which Brandom sees as a
potentially very promising alternative to representationalism. In
Brandom’s lexicon, rationalist pragmatism and rationalist expressivism
are equivalent terms.3 He very clearly attributes this idea to Hegel.
[R]ationalist expressivism understands the explicit – the thinkable, the
sayable, the form something must be in to count as having been expressed
– in terms of its role in inference. I take Hegel to have introduced this idea,
although he takes the minimal unit of conceptual content to be the whole
holistic system of inferentially interrelated judgeables, and so is not a
propositionalist.4

1 Beiser on Hegel’s place in German idealism

Beiser’s account of Hegel is ‘deflationary’, intended to undercut the

Hegelian view that German idealism culminates in Hegel’s position. The
view attributed to Hegel that his position represents the peak of German
idealism as well as the peak and end of philosophy itself has been on the
agenda roughly since Hegel’s death. That this view has no discernable
support in Hegel’s writings did not stop it from becoming a fixture in the
discussion about him. It was initially formulated by the young Hegelians
after Hegel’s death, then restated by Marxists, by Schelling, then later by

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Rockmore: On reading Hegel
Heidegger and more recently by Walter Schulz. Friedrich Engels suggests
that German idealism descends from heaven to earth in making thought
rather than being the starting point of the inquiry,5 and Georg Lukács
holds that German idealism peaks in Hegel’s mythological approach
which is replaced by Marx’s real solution of the problems.6 In his lectures
On the History of Modern Philosophy, Schelling claims that his own later
conception of positive philosophy carries German idealism beyond Hegel.
Schelling’s view of things was later restated in our time by Heidegger
and then, following Heidegger, in great detail by Walter Schulz. Beiser
echoes the Schelling–Heidegger view in suggesting that the German
idealist tradition peaks in Schelling. Beiser leaves little doubt where he
stands in writing that Schelling was ‘the most inventive, brilliant and
productive of all the absolute idealists, and indeed the most fertile’.7
Beiser has discussed Hegel in a number of books, most recently in
an enormous study of German idealism in which Hegel strangely does
not merit the separate treatment accorded, however, to such Romantics
as Hölderlin, Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel. Beiser’s reading of Hegel
is essentially negative, concerned to deny qualities others attribute to
Hegel by contextualizing the latter’s position. Strictly as a contextual-
ization, Beiser’s book is very impressive. It is more detailed and longer
than, say, Terry Pinkard’s already very large, very detailed, recent study
of German idealism.8 In comparison to Pinkard’s ‘neutral’ account of
German idealism as a whole, Beiser’s account is argumentative and often
frankly polemical. Though he claims to sketch what he describes as ‘the
origins of Schelling’s absolute idealism’,9 he also wants to discredit
Schelling as well as Hegel.
Beiser takes seriously the relation of German idealism to the
problem of knowledge, which Pinkard simply ignores. Beiser distantly
follows Kant in suggesting that German idealism turns on explaining
the possibility of knowledge according to idealist principles and in
accounting for the reality of the external world.10 He depicts the struggle
against subjectivism as the rejection of the doctrine that the subject
knows only its ideas, so there is no knowledge beyond consciousness.11
According to Beiser, who divides German idealism into subjective and
objective idealism, the former includes the ‘aggrandizement’ of the
transcendental subject12 and the latter comprises the progressive de-
subjectivization of the Kantian legacy.13
In Beiser’s account, Hegel and Schelling both come off badly, Hegel
worse than Schelling. Beiser denies Hegel is an original thinker in any
important sense in suggesting that all of his ideas can be traced back to
those of his Jena colleagues.14 His claim that Hegel followed Schelling’s
version of absolute idealism in the period 1801–415 overlooks the fact
that even in the Differenzschrift, his initial philosophical publication,
Hegel was not aligned on Schelling’s position.

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Beiser depicts Hegel and Schelling as defending the same, or indis-
tinguishably similar, approaches to the absolute. Schelling holds that
knowledge is possible if and only if there is no distinction, none at all,
between the subject and the absolute, and all knowledge is self-
knowledge.16 For Beiser, Schelling erroneously reinterprets Kant’s and
Fichte’s view that knowledge depends on a subject–object identity as
‘the self-consciousness of the transcendental subject that is presupposed
by all empirical consciousness’17 or again as the self-knowledge of the
absolute, or once more as the self-knowledge of God.18 Beiser, who
regards this specific approach to knowledge as a miserable failure, further
attributes it to Hegel.
One wonders if Beiser has provided the best readings of the posi-
tions in question. It is doubtful that Kant and Fichte read the so-called
subject–object identity in the same way. Kant’s formulation of the
problem of knowledge in the Herz letter requires an analysis of the
relation of representations to objects.19 Yet Fichte explicitly claims that
the mind-independent external world, what for Kant would be the
noumena, is beyond cognition.20 Both Kant and the early Fichte, before
he left Jena, pursue secular approaches to knowledge. Beiser may be
correct about Schelling, who, alone among the great German idealists,
turns from epistemology to theology. Hegel, who takes a secular
approach to knowledge, never argues that to know is to know God, nor
that knowledge is divine self-knowledge, nor that the absolute knows
itself, or even that in knowing the empirical subject coincides with the
transcendental subject. In abandoning transcendental philosophy as
Kant understands it, he follows Fichte down the path to a theory of
knowledge based on the accomplishments of finite human individuals.

2 Brandom on Hegelian holism

In a recent book, Brandom reprints an earlier article on Hegel and offers

a new analysis of Hegel’s holism. The two Hegel essays are accompanied
by a commentary about what Brandom intends to do and what he thinks
he has accomplished in these texts. Brandom, who tells us he is trying to
think about the holism which goes with a functional approach to inten-
tionality,21 sees Kant’s way of thinking about intentionality and concep-
tual content, which he does not clearly characterize, as important for
Hegel.22 In both Hegel essays in this volume, Brandom considers the
relation of intentional content, which for him means the way the world
is and the way we take it to be, as it relates to the self. Hegel’s innova-
tion lies in placing all this within a social process extending through
history, which Brandom links with pragmatism in writing: ‘For Hegel
places the sort of inferential/causal process central to that functionalism

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Rockmore: On reading Hegel
in the larger frame of historically extended social practice. Transposed
into this key, functionalism takes the form of pragmatism – “pragmatism
in the sense of a particular kind of use theory of meaning and content”.’23
In formulating his non-standard view of pragmatism in this way,
Brandom implicitly indicates three points. First, pragmatism is concerned
with the problem of meaning, hence with reference (and semantics). The
implication is clear in Brandom’s account that pragmatism is seamlessly
related to the traditional analytic concern with the theory of reference.
There is no difference, or no significant difference between them, at least
none which prohibits someone committed to the analytic theme of refer-
ence from taking over insights borrowed or adapted from pragmatism.
Some pragmatists, such as Peirce, are indeed concerned with meaning,
but perhaps in a different way than in the analytic theory of reference.
For Peirce, meaning concerns the expected practical consequences, not
truth, whereas after Frege the problem of reference is generally under-
stood to rely on the sense of an expression.
Second, the proper approach to reference lies in a theory of meaning
in use. This means that we can look to Hegel to supply such an
approach, if not with the formal sophistication of later analytic thinkers,
at least in outline. In this respect, in Brandom’s account Hegel appears
as a forerunner of Wittgenstein’s theory of meaning in use. Third, Hegel
is cast on this reading as another party in the effort to work out a causal
theory of perception. I take this to mean that Hegel is a conceptual
realist in the metaphysical realist mode. The general line of a causal
theory can be paraphrased as the view that there is a way the mind-
independent world is as it is, and that that world causally affects us in
causing us to perceive it in certain ways. Knowledge is the result of a
backward inference from effect to cause. In Hegel’s case the inference
is complicated since knowledge turns out to be a process. Important
here is the idea that Hegel relies on the way the world is, not, say, on
what is given in experience, and that the relation of subject to object is
mediated by a series of inferences from the subject side in response to
causal influences on it from the object side. If Brandom were correct,
then Hegel would ressemble Kant who holds that we can only defeat
the skeptic because there really is a causal connection in experience.24
The two Hegel essays are included in the second part of the book
under the heading ‘Historical Essays’. Brandom comments on these
essays in the first part of the book in an account of ‘Talking with the
Tradition’. The second essay, ‘Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel’s
Idealism’, which appeared earlier elsewhere, is republished unchanged
in this book. Since I do not see Brandom as breaking new ground with
respect to what he now says about this essay, I will concentrate my
remarks in this section on the new Hegel essay, ‘Holism and Idealism
in Hegel’s Phenomenology’.

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 33 (1)
In the new essay, Brandom takes up Hegel’s so-called conceptual
idealism with the intention of providing an account of the transition
from ‘Consciousness’ to ‘Self-consciousness’ in the Phenomenology. He
claims that Hegel bases his view of inferential relations on material
exclusion or incompatibility. ‘For Hegel, to be conceptually articulated
is just to stand in material relations of incompatibility and (so) conse-
quence.’25 Brandom goes on to assert that Hegel is committed to strong
individuational holism, that is, to the idea that relations of material
incompatibility are not only necessary but also sufficient to define
content. On this basis, he attributes to Hegel the so-called principal
thesis of objective idealism, namely, we can understand an objective
world only with respect to subjective error in claims about it. This leads
to three further claims with respect to the reciprocal dependence of
singular term and object, the reciprocal sense-dependence of asserting
and fact, and the reciprocal sense-dependence of necessity (and law)
and counterfactually robust inference. According to Brandom, holism
is also a reciprocal sense-dependence claim. He seems to have in mind
how it is that ‘a subjective process can make intelligible objective
holistic relational structures’.26 To put the point in different language,
Brandom is arguing that ‘understanding the objective world as deter-
minate for Hegel entails that it must be understood as a holistic
relational structure’.27
I have given this summary, taken from early in the book where
Brandom discusses his intentions in the new Hegel essay, since, although
typically complex, it is still simpler than Brandom’s essay. The essay
presupposes an account of what Hegel is doing in that work with respect
to holism. Though Brandom earlier featured a claimed relation between
conceptions of holism in Hegel and Quine, he simply drops Quine here
in substituting Sellars’ conceptual pragmatism and in concentrating
more directly on Hegel. The result is to extend the generally Sellarsian
reading of Hegel that Brandom started to work out elsewhere; for
instance, in Articulating Reasons.
In the essay, Brandom discusses the difference between properties
that are different but compatible and properties that are mutually
exclusive, or as he says materially incompatible, in depicting Hegel as
the first thinker to work out the consequences of semantic holism.28 I
take this to mean that for Brandom, Hegel is a semantic thinker, hence
concerned with the problem of reference, and committed to holism
which refuses atomism in a material sense. The first point seems correct,
since any type of holism has to decline atomism. The second point is
troublesome since it seems to commit Hegel to the kind of ontology
that, in following Kant, he is at pains to refuse. Brandom begins his
discussion of Hegel with the claim that Hegel starts ‘with the everyday
idea of how things are – the idea that there is some way the world is’.29

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Rockmore: On reading Hegel
Yet it is more plausible to read Hegel as refusing metaphysical realism,
hence as declining to base his approach to cognition on anything resem-
bling pre-Kantian metaphysics, which he clearly rejects in his account
of the First Attitude of Thought to Objectivity. Put differently, the whole
thrust of Hegel’s position lies in rejecting metaphysical realism and,
hence, representationalism for a conceptual analysis.
Brandom goes on to consider strong holism in some detail. We need
not follow him here. His account of objective relations and subjective
processes provides evidence of a fundamental difficulty in his effort to
characterize Hegel’s conceptual idealism. According to Brandom, this
amounts to ‘taking one’s commitments to be answerable to an objective
world (in the sense constitutive of treating them as representatations of
such a world)’.30 I believe, on the contrary, that this is a clear statement
of what Hegel is not committed to, in fact the traditional approach he
is rejecting in favor of his proposed new alternative. A main thrust of
the Phenomenology is the rejection of any kind of representationalism
in favor of concepts that are not intended as representing anything like
a mind-independent objective world as it is, which are simply not under-
stood on a representationalist model. For the idea which Brandom
advances that in the case of error our cognitions are answerable to the
world, more precisely ‘thereby treated as representations of such a
world’,31 Hegel substitutes the very different idea that our theories must
be tested against whatever is given in conscious experience. Brandom’s
reading holds only if the world as it is is given in experience. But there
is no way to show this. And in adopting concepts instead of represen-
tations Hegel rejects this hypothesis.
Brandom, who believes he has made his case that Hegelian concep-
tual idealism consists in correctly representing the world as it is, offers
a more formal sketch of the same claim based on Sellars’ conceptual
pragmatism. This leads him to a thesis about Hegel’s objective idealism
in the section on ‘Consciousness’: ‘determinateness requires a kind of
holism, and that holism is intelligible only on the hypothesis of objec-
tive idealism.’32
This claim seems misguided as a description of what happens in the
first section of the work. One point is the inability to refer to the world
as it is, which is not part of what Hegel is attempting. A further point
is the status of cognitive objects in the account of ‘Consciousness’. The
entire section consists in reviewing three models of the relation of subject
to object: respectively sense-certainty, or a primitive kind of empiricism
directed toward immediate knowledge (which tells us only that some-
thing is but not what it is); then perception, which identifies the many
properties or predicates of an unknowable subject; and finally the kind
of dualistic theorizing that relies on a supersensible realm, which is not
and cannot be given in experience, whether in classical mechanics

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 33 (1)
(which relies on force), or in the critical philosophy (which invokes the
understanding). Hegel’s main point is that mere consciousness of an
object without self-consciousness is insufficient for knowledge.
Brandom goes on to insist that in virtue of its holistic character
knowing develops dialectically. His effort toward providing a formal
description of the knowing process, which others have also under-
taken,33 is helpful. Missing, however, is any sense of the way that for
Hegel a cognitive object is literally ‘constituted’ by the conceptual frame-
work which picks it out. Brandom’s concept of strong exclusion points
toward metaphysical realism in which we gradually come to know the
object as it is. Hegel is, I think, saying something different. Unlike, say,
Putnam in his internal realist phase, Hegel does not claim that one and
the same reality is progressively disclosed in cognition. Rather, he
describes the way we develop different theories about, and more gener-
ally conceptual approaches to, what is given in experience, as a result
of which the object changes as the theory that identifies it changes. To
put the same point differently, the problem is not framed by material
incompatibility in any sense at all, if ‘material’ refers to the ways things
are. The problem rather lies in formulating a theory which corresponds
to what is experienced, where no relation is supposed between what is
experienced and what really is. If this is correct, then the idea that the
world is always already there, as Brandom notes, is not a challenge to
idealism, or at least not to Hegel’s idealism. The reason is not that the
world as it is there yields to cognition, but rather that Hegel is not inter-
ested in anything other than the contents of experience.

3 A sketch of a third approach to Hegel (and German idealism)

I believe that both Beiser and Brandom go astray in reading Hegel other-
wise than how he reads others, that is, in terms of the internal develop-
ment of their theories in response to philosophical problems with which
they were concerned as opposed to other, external concerns. Beiser reads
Hegel’s position in the context of German idealism in order to refute it
and Brandom reads it in the context of analytic philosophy to learn from
it. I will be recommending an alternative reading of Hegel’s position in
the context of German idealism in order to learn from it. I believe we
cannot magically detach Hegel from idealism in order to learn from, or
even to understand, his position. But I also believe we need to interpret
German idealism differently in order to grasp Hegel’s contribution.
Like many observers, I believe that Kant’s critical philosophy offers
a theory of knowledge. Kant’s problem and solution to it can be focused
in terms of realism. Following Peirce, I will be calling ontological meta-
physics,34 or metaphysical realism, the familiar idea going back in the

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Rockmore: On reading Hegel
western tradition until early Greek philosophy that it is possible, under
the proper conditions, to know mind-independent objects as they are and
indeed the world as it is. Metaphysical realism is less a successful theory
than an attitude, a mere state of mind, which has been remarkably
persistent since it was first formulated in the West in ancient Greece, but
which must be rejected in all its many forms. When one gives it up, then
in avoiding skepticism one naturally arrives at the constructivist alterna-
tive, arguably the best view we have, which rejects metaphysical realism
on the grounds that, as Kant famously writes, ‘reason has insight only
into that which it produces after a plan of its own’.35
Metaphysical realism is linked to two main epistemological strat-
egies, with many variants, including intuitionism as well as the modern
foundationalist approach to knowledge. Intuitionism is the view that
there is a direct grasp of the cognitive object, which is knowable without
any interface between the knower and the known, the subject and the
object of knowledge. An intuitive grasp of the world is widely favored
in the philosophical tradition from Plato, who suggests that on grounds
of nature and nurture some among us can be educated literally to see
reality, through Putnam’s latest form of realism. Foundationalism is a
strategy which appears in ancient philosophy, which is very popular in
modern times, and which is still widely represented.36 In its very influ-
ential Cartesian formulation, foundationalism includes an initial prin-
ciple, known to be true beyond the possibility of doubt, and from which
the remainder of the theory can be rigorously deduced.
Metaphysical realism is further linked to epistemological represen-
tationalism. By representationalism I will have in mind an approach to
knowledge in which access to the object is not direct, but indirect,
dependent on the representation of the cognitive object. Representation-
alism, which is widely present in philosophy and culture, which was
refuted by Plato in his polemic against art of all kinds as inadequate to
know the real, was later revived in modern philosophy. According to
the so-called new way of ideas, the relation between the subject and the
object is mediated by an idea in the mind, which provides a cognitive
link between knower and known, or subject and object. Variations on
this view are widely found in continental rationalism, especially
Descartes, as well as in English empiricism, particularly Locke, and even
in Kant.
Constructivism is present in such thinkers before Kant as Hobbes,
Vico and Herder, and after Kant with thinkers like W. von Humboldt,
Hegel, Marx, Cassirer, Dilthey, Fleck and Kuhn. Kant’s reading of the
rise of modern science is the basis of his own constructivist approach
to epistemology. In Kant, constructivism is widely associated with what
has come to be known as his Copernican revolution in philosophy.
Kant’s Copernican turn includes a refutation of metaphysical realism

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and a resultant embrace of constructivism on the grounds of his reading
of the history of modern science. Kant, who continually wavers between
two alternatives, is never able to make up his mind. A close reading of
the Critique of Pure Reason will show he is simultaneously committed
to the view that representations relate to an object, or thing in itself,
and the incompatible view that we only know what we construct,
produce or create.
The ambiguity in Kant’s position decreases rapidly in reaction to the
critical philosophy. The post-Kantian German idealists give up meta-
physical realism, hence representationalism, in favor of constructivism
and empirical realism. This shift is already present in Fichte, for whom
the problem of knowledge consists in an account from the angle of
vision of the subject of the interaction between the subject and an object
about which nothing further can be said.37 Hegel’s own approach to
knowledge features constructivism and empirical realism while aban-
doning any effort to know the way the world is. Starting in the
Differenzschrift, he consistently depicts knowledge as the result of the
ongoing process of working out an acceptable theory on the basis of
conscious experience, in which successive theories are tested and, if
necessary, modified in terms of further experience.

4 Conclusion: Hegel and realism

This article has considered recent approaches to Hegel proposed by

Beiser and Brandom and then proposed a more immanent approach
based on Hegel’s relation to Kant and the post-Kantian German ideal-
ists. Though I believe that the best approach to Hegel is not extrinsic
but immanent, I find many points of interest in Beiser’s and Brandom’s
recent discussions. I agree with both that realism is one of the keys to
grasping what happens in German idealism. But I disagree with Beiser
that Hegel gives up objective cognition for a subjective form of idealism,
and I disagree with Brandom that he features anything like a claim to
know the way the world is as opposed to how it appears in experience.
I believe that German idealism as a whole is concerned to work out the
real conditions of objective human knowledge. Kant notoriously reduces
the cognitive subject to its epistemological function in claiming that the
‘I think’ must always be able to accompany representations. As a result
of rethinking the subject as one or more finite human beings, later
German idealists restate Kant’s effort to specify the abstract conditions
of knowledge as an account of how human knowledge is possible under
historical conditions. In carrying the critical philosophy beyond Kant,
Hegel links knowledge-claims to experience in abandoning any claim to
know the way the world is. Though I cannot argue this point here, I

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Rockmore: On reading Hegel
would like to suggest that in tying objective cognition to knowledge of
the empirical real, hence in eschewing stronger claims to grasp the mind-
independent real world as it is, Hegel is very close to the theory that we
should now all be defending.38

Department of Philosophy, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

PSC

Notes
1 See Frederick C. Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjec-
tivisim, 1781–1801 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 6.
2 ibid., p. 10.
3 Robert Brandom, Articulating Reasons (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2000), pp. 22, 34.
4 ibid., p. 35.
5 See Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical
German Philosophy, ed. C. P. Dutt (New York: International Publishers,
1941).
6 See ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’, in Georg Lukács,
History and Class Consciousness, trans. R. Livingstone (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1971), pp. 83–222.
7 Beiser, German Idealism, p. 467.
8 See Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy, 1760–1869: The Legacy of Idealism
(Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
9 See Beiser, German Idealism, p. 595.
10 ibid., p. 14.
11 ibid., p. 1.
12 ibid., p. 2.
13 ibid., p. 6.
14 ibid., p. 10.
15 ibid., p. 465.
16 ibid., p. 590.
17 ibid.
18 ibid., p. 593.
19 See letter to Herz dated 21 July 1772, in Immanuel Kant, Philosophical
Correspondence, 1759–99, ed. and trans. Arnulf Zweig (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 71.
20 See Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge, in Fichte: Science of
Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre), trans. P. Heath and J. Lachs (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 246.
21 Robert Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Meta-
physics of Intentionality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003),
p. 34.
22 ibid., p. 46.
23 ibid., p. 47.

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24 See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 168.
25 Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead, p. 49.
26 ibid., p. 51.
27 ibid., pp. 51–2.
28 See ibid., p. 183.
29 ibid., p. 178.
30 ibid., p. 193.
31 ibid.
32 ibid., p. 201.
33 See Michael Kosok, ‘The Formalization of Hegel’s Dialectical Logic’, in
Hegel: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Alasdair MacIntyre (Garden
City, NY: Doubleday, 1978), pp. 237–88.
34 See ‘What Is Pragmatism’, in The Essential Peirce, ed. Nathan Houser et al.
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), vol. II, p. 338.
35 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B xiii.
36 For a recent example, see Richard Swinburne, Epistemic Justification
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
37 See Fichte-Werke, ed. I. H. Fichte (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1970), vol. I,
p. 279.
38 See, for further discussion, Tom Rockmore, Hegel, Idealism and Analytic
Philosophy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).

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