Ebook: A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology

This book presents a completely new retelling, in contemporary terms, of the romantic rationalist adventure of ideas that is Hegel's classic Phenomenology of Spirit. At its core is a nonpsychological conception of the conceptual, according to which the fact that there are laws of nature means that the objective world, no less than our thought about it, is already in conceptual shape. What Hegel takes to be the single biggest thing that ever happened in human history--the shift from traditional to distinctively modern ways of living, acting, and thinking--is explained as a fundamental change in the structure of normativity. Properly understanding that progressive structural transformation in turn points the way to a more perfect form of self-conscious life, and so to post-modernity as a dawning third age of what he calls "Spirit." What emerges is an account of what we most deeply are, in the form of a sweeping "history of the progress of the consciousness of freedom."--;Introduction : A pragmatist semantic reading of Hegel's Phenomenology -- Part One: Semantics and epistemology : knowing and representing the objective world. Conceptual realism and the semantic possibility of knowledge -- Representation and the experience of error : a functionalist approach to the distinction between appearance and reality -- Following the path of despair to a bacchanalian revel: the emergence of the second, true, object -- Immediacy, generality, and recollection : first lessons on the structure of epistemic authority -- Understanding the object / property structure in terms of negation: an introduction to Hegelian logic and metaphysics in the perception chapter -- "Force" and understanding-from object to concept: the ontological status of theoretical entities and the laws that implicitly define them -- Objective idealism and modal expressivism -- Part Two: Normative pragmatics : recognition and the expressive metaphysics of agency. The structure of desire and recognition : self-consciousness and self-constitution -- The fine structure of autonomy and recognition: the institution of normative statuses by normative attitudes -- Allegories of mastery: the pragmatic and semantic basis of the metaphysical incoherence of authority without responsibility -- Hegel's expressive metaphysics of agency: the determination, identity, and development of what is done -- Recollection, representation, and agency -- Part Three. Recollecting the ages of spirit : from irony to trust : The history of normative structures: on beyond immediate Sittlichkeit -- Alienation and language -- Edelmutigkeit and Niedertrachtigkeit: the Kammerdiener -- Confession and forgiveness, recollection and trust -- Conclusion: Semantics with an edifying intent : recognition and recollection on the way to the age of trust.