Paul Redding

In his program of analytic pragmatism, Robert Brandom has presented a thoroughgoing reinterpretation of the place of analytic philosophy in the history of philosophy by linking his own non-representational ‘inferentialist’ approach to semantics to the rationalist – idealist tradition, and in particular, to Hegel. Brandom, however, has not been without his critics in regard to both his approach to semantics and his interpretation of Hegel. Here I single out four interlinked problematic areas facing Brandom's inferentialist semantics – his approach of perceptual content, to de re attitudes, to perceptual experience and to modality, and then go on to contrast the different approach to these issues that is found in Hegel. While Hegel can helpfully be understood as anticipating an inferentialist semantics as Brandom claims, his is a weak inferentialism in contrast to Brandom's strong version. With his weakly inferentialist approach Hegel can, I suggest, be seen as providing a solution to the tangle of problems..

McDowell’s attempts to find a way out of the grip of some seemingly intractable problems besetting analytic philosophy has led him back to Kant and Hegel. Understanding, with Kant, the role played by concepts in experience will point the way forward, but Kant’s thinking must be released from its own problems which threaten to reduce the contents of experience and knowledge to “facts about us”. Kant’s “subjectivism” must be subjected to an “Hegelian” critique. However, McDowell’s solution to that problem, which involves a radical reinterpretation of Kant’s concept–intuition distinction, introduces new problems. Here I contrast McDowell’s reinterpretation of the intuition–concept relation with a less radical one suggested by Wilfrid Sellars, and based on his diagnosis of the ambiguity of Kant’s notion of intuition. The Sellarsian modest revision of Kant both gives a better account of perceptual experience and helps us better to understand the step that Hegel had taken beyond Kant.