Hegel and Analytic Philosophy

R O B E RT B. B R A N D OM

A B S T R A C T : This paper analyzes important elements in the reception of Hegel’s

philosophy in the present. In order to reach this goal we discuss how analytic
philosophy receives Hegel’s philosophy. For that purpose, we reconstruct the
reception of analytic philosophy in the face of Hegel, especially from those authors
who were central in this movement of reception and distance of his philosophy,
namely, Bertrand Russell, Frege and Wittgenstein. Another central point of this paper
is to review the book of Paul Redding, Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian
Thought, in comparison with the reception of Hegel, developed here by analytic
philosophy. Finally, we show how a dialogue can be productive of these apparently
opposing currents.

K E Y W O R D S : Critique; Analytic philosophy; Hegel; Reception.

A R T I C L E H I S T O R Y : Received: 10–march–2019 | Accepted: 8–july–2019.

§1. Paul Redding’s thoughtful and thought-provoking book Analytic

Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought is a paradigm of the sort of
philosophy Hegel described as “its time, captured in thought.” It is at once
impressively and usefully learned, and philosophically insightful and
suggestive. Redding’s strategy is to tunnel from two directions. On the one
hand, he has interesting things to say about what elements in the analytic
tradition make it ripe for a Hegelian turn. On the other, he lays out some
features of Hegel’s views that are particularly amenable to appropriation by
that tradition. I think one probably learns more from this book about Hegel
than one does about analytic philosophy. But that does not keep Redding
from putting himself in a position to draw some more general conclusions.

Robert B. Brandom (✉) ANALYSIS | Vol. 23, Nº 2 (2019), pp. 1-20

University of Pittsburgh, USA DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3333049
[email protected] ARTICULO

© 2019 Analysis — REDESEP | ISSN: 2386-3994| Disponible en: http://analysis-rp.eu/analysis/vol23/brandom/

2 | ROBERT B. BRANDOM

Redding is good on the origin myth that Bertrand Russell concocted,

which locates the wellsprings of the analytic movement in a principled recoil
from what the British Idealists made of Hegel. As Russell presents things,
Hegel merely brings out explicitly what was all along implicit in the
traditional subject-predicate term-logic: a thorough-going ontological
holism. Redding quotes Russell from his 1914 Our Knowledge of the External
World:

Now the traditional logic holds that every proposition ascribes a predicate to a subject,
and from this it easily follows that there can be only one subject, the Absolute, for if there
were two, the proposition that there were two would not ascribe a predicate to either.1

It seems a bit much to object to traditional term-logic for not being atomistic
enough.
After all, it is relations that it had the most trouble expressing. In any case,
since traditional logicians were accustomed to treating, say, being a twin as a
property, they would not have balked at not being lonely (in the sense of being
the only subject). To be fair, when Russell was in full propaganda mode for
the new logic he was quite capable of blaming subject-predicate logic for the
oppression of women, famine in China, and the First World War. Be that as
it may, Russell lines up the choice between the old logic, which he sees Hegel
(or at least his followers, especially Bradley) as having brought to its logical
metaphysical conclusion, and the new quantificational logic with the choice
between ontological monism and pluralism: as he memorably put it, between
seeing the universe as a bowl of jelly and seeing it as a bucket of shot.2

1
London: Allen and Unwin, p. 48. Henceforth APRHT.
2
[Some have suggested that the text is garbled on this point, and that the original referred
not to ontological but to deep political, and perhaps ultimately affective differences between
the sensibilities of Bradley (author of My Station and Its Duties) and Russell (author of Why
I Am Not a Christian), one viewing the smug, placid, late-Victorian world as a bowl of jolly
and the other as a bucket of shit.]
 HEGEL AND ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY | 3

On such an understanding, semantic, logical, and metaphysical atomism

is an, indeed the, essential, founding principle of analytic philosophy. Now I
think, as Redding does, that Hegel was, indeed, a semantic, logical, and
metaphysical holist. If that is right, then on the line that Russell was pushing,
bringing Hegel back into the analytic conversation would require jettisoning
its beating heart: first-order quantificational predicate logic. But I do not
think that Hegel was driven to holism because the logic he and Kant inherited
was a term-logic. If anything that fact made it more difficult for him to find
coherent ways to express his holism. And Russell’s atomistic insistence on
starting with objects, and building up first propositions and then inferential
relations among propositions follows the very same order of logical and
semantic explanation that was enshrined in the traditional logic’s progression
from a basic doctrine of concepts (singular and general), to a doctrine of
judgments (classified according to the kinds of classification or predication
they involve, to a doctrine of syllogisms (classified according to the kinds of
classifications their component judgments involve). In this regard, it was
Russell who was the reactionary.
But the early analytic tradition did not speak with just this one, Russellian,
voice. Redding reminds us that the first step on the holistic road to Hegel was
taken already by Kant, who broke with the traditional order of semantic and
logical explanation by insisting on the primacy of judgment. He understood
particular and general representations, intuitions and concepts, only in terms
of the functional role they played in judgment. (I think that is because
judgments are the minimal units of responsibility, so that the primacy of
judgment should be understood as an immediate consequence of the
normative turn Kant had given philosophy of mind and semantics—but that
is a story for another occasion.3) Frege took up this Kantian idea, in the form
of his “context principle”: only in the context of a sentence do names have
reference. Wittgenstein, early and late, sees sentences as playing some such
distinguished role, first as the minimal unit of sense, and later as the minimal

3
Literally. I tell it in my Woodbridge lectures: Animating Ideas of Idealism: A Semantic Sonata
in Kant and Hegel, is the first part of my Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas.
4 | ROBERT B. BRANDOM

linguistic unit that can be used to make a move in a language-game. In other

important figures, such as Carnap and C.I. Lewis, the empiricist-atomist
current of thought, which had motivated Russell, coexisted and blended with
serious neo-Kantian influences, even where those did not take the form of
treating propositional contents as primary in the order of semantic
explanation. Redding credits this Kant-Frege-Wittgenstein strand in analytic
philosophy with opening up the space within which an eventual
rapprochement with Hegel might take place.
I think he is right about that. But I also think that continuing the story
beyond the early history of the analytic movement on which Redding focuses
helps round out the story. For the Kantian promotion of judgment to pride
of logico-semantic place is only the first step away from the atomism of the
traditional order of explanation towards full Hegelian holism. Hegel didn’t
just start in the middle of the traditional order, with judgment rather than
concept; he fully turned it on its head, not only understanding objects and
concepts in terms of judgments, but understanding judgments in terms of
their role in inference. And just as some philosophers who played central
roles in the analytic tradition followed Kant, others took the further holist
step down that road that Hegel had pioneered. Indeed, all these strands of
thought were represented already in the classical American pragmatist
tradition: not only the empiricist-atomist line (think of James’s radical
monism), but also the Kantian (Peirce) and even the Hegelian (Dewey, and
Peirce as well). Quine, heir to both this tradition (via his teacher, C. I. Lewis,
himself the student of James and the Hegelian Josiah Royce) and the
logistical-analytic one, in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” took the minimal
unit of meaning to be, not the proposition, but what he called “the whole
theory”: everything one believed, and all the inferential connections linking
them to each other and to other believables. Davidson deepened and
developed this thought, and explored its consequences for a number of topics
of central concern to the analytic tradition. To those coming of philosophical
age during this period, the influence of this line of thought could seem so
pervasive that someone like Jerry Fodor could, with some justification, see his
 HEGEL AND ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY | 5

reassertion of semantic atomism as swimming against the dominant tide of

the times.
In this connection it is interesting to recall the considerations that
impelled Quine to endorse this holist move. His slogan was “Meaning is what
essence becomes, when it is detached from the thing, and attached to the
word.” This dictum expresses the translation of ontological issues into a
semantic key that was the hallmark of the linguistic turn. Quine rejected
essences because he rejected as ultimately unintelligible everything expressed
by the vocabulary of alethic modality. (In another fine phrase, he dismissed
modal logic as at best “engendering an illusion of understanding.”) He did so
on two grounds. First of all was the residual empiricism that remained even
after he had rejected the “two dogmas of empiricism.” As far as modality
went, he thought that “the Humean condition is the human condition.”
Second was the fact that the new logic, in the post-Fregean, pre-Kripkean,
Russellian stage of development that Quine perfected, did not have the
expressive resources to deal semantically with modality. For these reasons,
Quine had to reject the distinction between internal and external relations:
those that are essential to the identity of a thing and those that are merely
accidental to it. (In a Bradleyan example: the relation between the rungs and
the rails of a ladder are internal to it, while its relation to the wall it is leaning
against is external.) Since one of the empiricist dogmas Quine was rejecting
was its semantic atomism, he could not follow Russell (and the Tractatus) in
responding to his rejection of the distinction by, in effect, treating all relations
as external. The result was his recoil to a thoroughgoing semantic holism, in
which all their inferential relations are treated as constitutive of the meaning
of sentences and (so) the terms and predicates they contain—as all being, in
effect, internal relations. Attempting to evade what Whitehead called the
“fallacy of lost contrast,” and in keeping with his Russellian logic, he
construed those inferential relations extensionally, as not being modally
robust, in the sense of counterfactual-supporting, but even so, semantic
holism had been let loose in the land.
6 | ROBERT B. BRANDOM

This development demonstrated a dynamic that I think is active in our

own time, and that Russell and Moore had already warned against. For the
fighting faith they crafted for the new analytic movement did not define its
creed just by rejection of Hegel. They understood the idealist rot they fought
against as having set in already with Kant. They suspected that one could not
open the pearly gates of analytic respectability far enough to let Kant slip
through, and then close them quickly enough to keep Hegel out. Both Quine’s
example and some of the contemporary developments Redding rehearses
suggest they might turn out to have been right. In this connection I think it is
instructive to recall just how recently it is that Kant has re-entered the analytic
canon. Russell’s and Moore’s strictures by and large held until they were
loosened in the late ‘60s by Strawson and Bennett’s work on and use of Kant’s
theoretical philosophy, and Rawls’s Kantian work in practical philosophy
(especially his 1970 Theory of Justice). Since then we have had several
academic generations of first-rate analytic work on Kant. And now, as day
follows night, we see the first stirrings of what Redding calls “the return of
Hegelian thought” in analytic circles. My guess is that Hegel is just too
interesting a reader of Kant to be struck off the rolls of the readable once Kant
himself has moved to center stage (elbowing empiricism into the wings).
Wilfrid Sellars once said that he hoped that an effect of his work would be to
begin to move analytic philosophy from its Humean to its Kantian phase. And
Rorty has characterized my work, and that of John McDowell, as potentially
helping to begin to move it from its incipient Kantian to its inevitable
Hegelian phase. This is the development Redding is characterizing and
assisting. (The Marxists always claimed that one should push what is falling.)
Wittgenstein is an interesting case in point for such a transition. For if we
think about the pride of place given to propositional content in the former,
and the social theory of the normativity characteristic of intentionality in the
latter, we can see the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus as a neo-kantian, without
Kant’s residual empiricism, and the Wittgenstein of the Investigations as a
neo-hegelian, without Hegel’s revived rationalism.
 HEGEL AND ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY | 7

There is another Kantian, anti-empiricist, ultimately anti-atomistic theme

running through recent analytic philosophy that Redding does not discuss. It,
too, I think will eventually support a renewed appreciation of Hegelian ideas.
This is the axial role modality should be understood to play in semantics,
logic, and metaphysics. One of the driving motors of Kant’s recoil from
empiricism is his realization that the framework of empirical description—
the commitments, practices, abilities, and procedures that form the necessary
practical background within the horizon of which alone it is possible to
engage in the cognitive theoretical activity of describing how things
empirically are—essentially involves elements expressible in words that are
not descriptions, that do not perform the function of describing how things
are at the ground level. These include what is made explicit as statements of
laws, using alethic modal concepts to relate the concepts applied in
descriptions. As Sellars put the point:

It is only because the expressions in terms of which we describe objects, even such basic
expressions as words for the perceptible characteristics of molar objects, locate these
objects in a space of implications, that they describe at all, rather than merely label.4

And the implications that articulate that “space of reasons” are modally
robust, counterfactual-supporting ones. It was appreciation of this Kantian
point that led the American neo-Kantian C.I. Lewis to apply the methods of
the new logic to develop modal logics (indeed, he did so essentially
contemporaneously with Principia Mathematica). Sellars draws the
conclusion, which Quine had not, that the “whole theories” that Quine saw
as the minimal “unit of meaning” were theories that included laws. He
summed this lesson up in the title of one of his less readable essays “Concepts
as Involving Laws, and Inconceivable without Them.”5

4
Pp. 306-307 (§107) in: Wilfrid Sellars: “Counterfactuals, Dispositions, and Causal
Modalities” In Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Volume II: Concepts, Theories,
and the Mind-Body Problem, ed. Herbert Feigl, Michael Scriven, and Grover Maxwell
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958), p.225-308.
5
Sellars, W. (1948) “Concepts as Involving Laws, and Inconceivable Without Them.”
8 | ROBERT B. BRANDOM

A holism that emphasizes the semantogenic character of alethic modal

relations of necessitation and preclusion brings us much closer to Hegel than
even Quine had gotten. For at the center of Hegel’s innovations is a non-
psychological conception of the conceptual, according to which to be a modal
realist about the objective world (the world as it is independent of its relation
to any activities or processes of thinking) is thereby to be a conceptual realist
about it. On this way of thinking about the conceptual, to take it that there
really are laws of nature, that it is objectively necessary that pure copper melt
at 1084° C., and impossible for a mass to be accelerated without being
subjected to some force, is to see that objective world as already in conceptual
shape, and hence graspable as such. For Hegel understands what is conceptual
as whatever stands in relations of what he calls “determinate negation” and
“mediation”—by which he means material incompatibility and material
consequence. For there to be some determinate way the world is just is for it
to be articulated into states of affairs—objects possessing properties and
standing in relations—that include and exclude each other in modally robust
ways. Grasping those conceptual structures in thought is conforming one’s
practice of amplifying and criticizing one’s commitments to those objective
relations: embracing the inferential consequences of the commitments one
acknowledges, and rejecting commitments that are incompatible with them.
The same sort of consideration that convinces us that we will not succeed
in building up an understanding of facts and states of affairs (statables,
claimables, judgeables) from one of objects (and properties and relations
thought of as a kind of thing), but must rather seek to understand objects and
properties and relations in terms of the contribution they make to facts and
states of affairs, should be deployed as well to convince us that facts and states
of affairs cannot be made intelligible except in the light of the modally robust,
counterfactual-supporting (“lawlike”) material consequential and
incompatibility relations they stand in to one another and which articulate
their propositional contents. To take that step is to embark on one path that
leads from Kant to Hegel. For it is to move from the order of semantic and

Philosophy of Science 15: 287–315.

 HEGEL AND ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY | 9

ontological explanation that takes judgment, the understanding, as primary,

to embrace the metaconception that takes inference, reason as primary. In
Hegel’s adaptation of Kant’s terminology, that is to move from the framework
of Verstand to that of Vernunft.6
The modal revolution that has taken place in analytic philosophy in the
last half-century amounts to a decisive repudiation of the hostility to modality
that resulted from the unfortunate consonance on this point of both of the
intellectual inspirations of logical empiricism. I take it to have developed
through three phases so far: Kripke’s seminal development of possible worlds
semantics for the whole range of C.I. Lewis’s modal logics, the employment
of that apparatus to provide intensional semantics for a host of non-logical
expressions, and the sequelae of Kripke’s treatment of proper names in
“Naming and Necessity.” The last of these, deepened and extended to apply
to other sorts of expressions such as natural kind terms, indexicals, and
demonstratives, has been associated with the severing of physical-causal and
conceptual modalities from metaphysical ones, and the pursuit of semantics
in terms of the latter rather than the former. That is, it has carried with it the
rejection of the association of modality and conceptual articulation that both
Quine and Sellars had taken for granted (the former as a reason to do without
both, the latter in embracing them). But that rejection is crucially predicated
on a psychological conception of the conceptual: one that understands
concepts in the first instance in terms of our grip on them, rather than, as
Kant had taught, in terms of their normative bindingness on us. We have yet
to achieve a reconciliation and synthesis of the Kripke-Kaplan-Stalnaker-
Lewis (David) approach to modality with the Kant-Hegel-Sellars one—but
perhaps someday we shall.7

6
Cf. APRHT p. 137.
7
I take some initial steps towards one way of doing this in the last three chapters of Between
Saying and Doing. Although the point is not developed there, as Jaroslav Peregrin has shown,
the incompatibility semantics that is introduced there can in large part be translated into
possible world semantics, by trading minimal incoherent sets of sentences for maximal
coherent ones.
10 | ROBERT B. BRANDOM

§2. One of Redding’s aims in this book is to emphasize the importance not
only of Kant’s, but of Aristotle’s influence on Hegel. In this connection, he
can celebrate McDowell’s approach. He does so in two fine chapters on
Aristotle, Hegel, and McDowell on phronesis and the “dynamics of evaluative
reason.” I won’t say anything in detail about this discussion, keeping my focus
here (and not only here) rather on theoretical semantic, logical, and
metaphysical issues than on those arising in practical philosophy. A principal
manifestation of his concern to follow Hegel in keeping Aristotle in view is
that a thread running throughout Redding’s book concerns the significance
of Hegel’s working within the ultimately Aristotelian tradition of term logic,
rather than the modern context he calls (somewhat misleadingly)
“propositional logic.” In my remarks so far, I have concentrated on the
perspective on Hegel and analytic philosophy that results when one regards
them from the point of view of the tension between Hegel’s holism and
Russell’s atomism and nominalism. (Nominalism is what atomism becomes,
when it is detached from the world and attached to the word.) But Redding
thinks that some of the lessons I extract from my reading of Hegel are
distorted by being situated in the framework of twentieth century logical
categories, rather than the traditional term-logical categories Hegel adapts to
his distinctive expressive purposes.
Redding is certainly right to remind us to be vigilant about implicit
hermeneutic assumptions that might stem from forgetting about the very
different logical setting Hegel was working in in the first third of the
nineteenth century. He is surely also right, as was already pointed out, that
this difference mattered a great deal to the terms in which Russell (especially)
drew the bright border line (which he exhorted us to defend) between
Hegelian thought (even, and perhaps especially, in its late nineteenth century
Bradleyan form) and the nascent analytic movement in philosophy. For the
term “analytic philosophy” has, among its many senses, a narrow one in
which its characteristic core commitment is to working out how the “new
logic” that triggered the movement at the dawn of the twentieth century
opens up new approaches to central concepts, issues, and accounts of
traditional philosophical concern. This project and its master idea tie together
 HEGEL AND ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY | 11

Frege, Russell, Carnap, the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, Ramsey, Ayer, and
C.I. Lewis, in the first half of the century, and such figures as Quine, Sellars,
Davidson, Hempel, Putnam, Dummett, Geach and David Lewis in the second
half. This narrow characterization would not, I think, count in even Moore,
nor the later Wittgenstein. Peirce would be included, but not James or Dewey.
This restrictive criterion of demarcation would validate common usage by
excluding Heidegger, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty, not to mention Rorty. But
it would diverge from that usage in excluding also such figures as Rawls,
Nagel, Searle, Stroud, and Fodor—though not Strawson, Kaplan, Burge,
Stalnaker, and Friedman. I have signed on to this expedition (explicitly in
Between Saying and Doing, and implicitly in Making It Explicit), but
McDowell (in Mind and World) is not even a fellow-traveler. It is, then, a very
narrow criterion.
But is Redding right to see the difference between Hegel’s term logic and
our logic as engendering a substantial tension at the heart of the project of
integrating Hegel’s ideas into the analytic conversation? I do not think so. A
principal test case, to which he devotes the penultimate chapter of the book,
concerns negation and contradiction. The master-concept of Hegel’s logic,
semantics, and metaphysics is determinate negation.8 It is modal concept. We
have to understand it (we are told in the Perception chapter of the
Phenomenology) in terms of the difference between two kinds of difference:
mere or indifferent [gleichgültige] difference and exclusive [ausschließende]
difference. Square and red are different properties in the first sense, while

8
Mediation is also a key concept, but is clearly subordinated to determinate negation.
‘Mediation’ is a matter of standing in inferential relations. Indeed, the term itself derives
from the role the middle term in a syllogism performs in licensing the move from major and
minor premises to the conclusion in a syllogism. It is also clear, I think, that the inferential
relations Hegel has in mind are thought of as modally robust inferences of the sort that
would be expressed by counterfactual conditionals. Although Hegel nowhere makes this
point, I think the connection is secured by the fact that such inferences can be defined in
terms of material incompatibilities (determinate negations). For p entails q (Pa entails Qa)
in a modally strong sense in case everything incompatible with q is incompatible with p.
Thus “Pedro is a donkey” entails ‘Pedro is a mammal”, because everything incompatible
with being a mammal is incompatible with being a donkey (but not vice versa).
12 | ROBERT B. BRANDOM

square and circular are different in the modally oomphier second sense: they
are incompatible. It is impossible (an alethic modal matter) for one and the
same plane figure to exhibit both. We can say that circular is a (not ‘the’)
determinate negation of square. Determinate negation is to be distinguished
not only from mere (compatible) difference, but also from what Hegel calls
‘formal’ or ‘abstract’ negation: not-square. As Redding notes, determinate
negations are Aristotelian contraries, while formal negations are Aristotelian
contradictories.
On this point, Redding says that

Hegel’s meaning is masked if one approaches his logical claims exclusively from a
fundamentally propositionally-based approach to logic, and ignores the irreducible role
Hegel attributes to aspects of Aristotelian term logic.9

The key point seems to be that

Term negation produces the contrary of the term negated, while denying rather than
affirming a predicate of a subject produces a sentence that is contradictory to the
affirmation.10

That is true, but it does not follow that term logic has some inherent
advantage in expressing determinate, rather than formal, negations. After all,
we can use classical formal negation to form the contradictories of predicates,
too, as we did with not-square above. The important move is from formal
inconsistency to material incompatibility. On the side of inference, this is the
move to what Sellars calls “material” inferences: those underwritten by the
content of the non-logical concepts they essentially involve. These are
inferences such as “It is raining, so the streets will be wet,” or “Pittsburgh is
to the West of Philadelphia, so Philadelphia is to the East of Pittsburgh.”

9
APRHT p. 204.
10
APRHT p. 207.
 HEGEL AND ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY | 13

Material incompatibilities and consequences can be considered either for

predicates (properties) or for sentences (states of affairs). The difference of
logical categorial focus is orthogonal to the distinction between material
incompatibility and formal inconsistency. So I do not see that the centrality
of the concept of determinate negation to Hegel’s enterprise gives us any
reason to think that Hegel’s meaning will be “masked” if we don’t follow him
in setting his claims in the framework of a term logic.
To be fair, Redding seems to concede some of this:

While Brandom’s inferentialist reading of Hegel tends to work from within a uniformly
Fregean approach to logic, there seems nothing substantial about his position that would
not allow the considerations that have been appealed to here from being assimilated
within the inferentialist project. 11

But then there is the bit where he takes it back. The passage continues:

Nevertheless, it would seem that from a strictly Hegelian position, Brandom’s

naturalistic metaposition would be regarded as working at the level of ‘the
Understanding’ rather than ‘Reason’.

I do not see that this characterization is warranted. What stands behind it, I
think, is two claims. First, Fregean approaches to logic are Kantian in giving
pride of logico-semantic categorial place to the level of judgment. That is
characteristic of the Understanding (in both Kant’s and Hegel’s usages).
Second, the Hegelian metaconceptual framework of Reason is articulated by
material incompatibility and consequence relations. But Fregean logic
concerns formal logical inconsistency and consequence. I accept those claims,
more or less. But the conclusion that because I use Fregean apparatus I am
not capturing what is distinctive of Hegel’s framework of Vernunft does not
follow from them. On the first point, I start with inference—and so, I would
argue, does Frege, at least in his seminal Begriffsschrift of 1979. For there he

11
APRHT p. 218.
14 | ROBERT B. BRANDOM

introduces his topic, conceptual content [begrifflicher Inhalt] with the

observation:

...there are two ways in which the content of two judgments may differ; it may, or it may
not, be the case that all inferences that can be drawn from the first judgment when
combined with certain other ones can always also be drawn from the second when
combined with the same other judgments. The two propositions 'the Greeks defeated the
Persians at Plataea' and 'the Persians were defeated by the Greeks at Plataea' differ in the
former way; even if a slight difference of sense is discernible, the agreement in sense is
preponderant. Now I call that part of the content that is the same in both the conceptual
content. Only this has significance for our symbolic language [Begriffsschrift]... In my
formalized language [BGS]...only that part of judgments which affects the possible
inferences is taken into consideration. Whatever is needed for a correct ['richtig', usually
misleadingly translated as 'valid'] inference is fully expressed; what is not needed
is...not.12

Conceptual content is determined by inferential role. Further, since the point

of introducing specifically logical vocabulary is for Frege to codify antecedent
proprieties of inference that articulate the conceptual content of non-logical
expressions, it is clear that the inferences he has in mind as articulating those
contents is material inferences. At any rate, that is the understanding of Frege
on the basis of which I am prepared to use some of his metaconceptual
apparatus to explicate Hegel. This does not put Frege, or me, on the wrong
(unHegelian) side of the fundamental Verstand/Vernunft divide.
Furthermore, there is an important dimension along which it seems
to me that Frege’s logic offers a decisive advance over the term-logic Hegel
was obliged to take as his starting-point, precisely in regard to the holistic top-
down order of semantic explanation characteristic of Vernunft. For Frege’s
function-and-argument analysis is exactly the decompositional tool one
needs to implement an explanatory strategy that moves from inference,
through judgment, to terms and concepts, reversing the traditional term-
logical strategy. It is the method of noting invariance under substitution,

12
Frege, Begriffsschrift, section 3.
 HEGEL AND ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY | 15

developed already by Bolzano. In the version I elaborate in Chapter Six of

Making It Explicit, one treats two sentences as expressing the content just in
case substituting one for the other as premise or conclusion of inferences
never turns a materially good inference into a materially bad one. One then
treats two predicates (say) as expressing the same concept in case substituting
one for another never changes the content of sentences containing them. The
result is a categorial framework intermediate between, but much more
intricately structured than either jelly or shot. If we are interested in
developing and thinking through the consequences of a shift from an
empiricist atomism-nominalism, first to judgement-based Verstand and then
to inference-based Vernunft, Frege’s logic gives us far better expressive tools
to do so than does the traditional logic. And it is certainly capable of
expressing predicate-negation as well as sentential negation. Indeed, once
again, it is just what is wanted to clarify the differences and relations between
them.13
One crucial touchstone for the assessment of any account of Hegel’s
notion of determinate negation is what sense one is able to make of his
friendliness to contradictions. Redding spend a good bit of his chapter on this
topic patiently pointing out many reasons not to understand Hegel as
embracing a position of the kind that has been worked out in detail in
contemporary dialethism. This is a useful, if unexciting, enterprise, which I
suppose Redding felt obliged as an Australian to walk through. I would have
been glad, however, for a discussion that penetrated closer to the heart of this
issue. I would encapsulate it in four claims:

1. The formal law of noncontradiction, forbidding simultaneous

commitment to p and its negation ~p, is correct as far as it goes, but

13
Danielle Macbeth’s pathbreaking Frege’s Logic [Harvard University Press, 2005] argues
persuasively that one of its principal expressive advantages is its capacity to express the modal
relations among concepts that must be tacked on as embarrassing afterthoughts to the
Russell-Carnap-Tarski-Quine version of the new logic.
16 | ROBERT B. BRANDOM

fails to capture more than an abstract shadow of the important

phenomenon.
2. Material contradiction—finding oneself with materially
incompatible commitments, commitments that are determinate
negations of one another—is inevitable.
3. Such contradictions show that something is wrong: that one has
made an error (or practical failure).
4. Nonetheless, material contradictions and the errors they indicate are
the path of (not to) truth.

Formal negation is an abstraction from determinate negation, which is what

really matters.14 The sense in which material incompatibility (one sense of
‘contradiction’) is fundamental to the objective world is that to be a
determinate property or state of affairs is to contrast with (in the sense of
modally excluding) other properties an object might have, or states of affairs
that might obtain—that is, to stand in relations of determinate negation to
other items of the same ontological category. “Omnis determinatio est
negatio.” The sense in which material incompatibility is fundamental to our
cognitive and practical activities is that there is, and can in principle be no set
of determinate concepts such that correct application of them—following the
norms for their use—will never lead to commitments that are incompatible
according to those material conceptual norms.
Why not? I think Hegel has a radically new idea of what the conceptual
inexhaustibility of sensuous immediacy consists in—one that is consonant
with his new holistic Vernunft setting, rather than that of Verstand or of
atomism. The tradition (Kant included) had understood the sense in which
the immediate deliveries of our senses outrun what we can capture
conceptually as a matter of its inexhaustibility by judgments. No matter how

14
If P is a property, ~P can be thought of as the minimal materially incompatible property of
P: the one possession of which is entailed by every property materially incompatible with P.
Thus not-square is entailed by circular, triangular, hexagonal, and so on.
 HEGEL AND ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY | 17

many true perceptual judgments we might make, there will always remain
further truths that remain as yet unexpressed. Fully capturing what we sense
in conceptually articulated judgments is an infinite task (in Fichte’s sense),
hence in principle uncompletable. This is an appeal to what Hegel called “bad
infinity.” The good infinity characteristic of Vernunft is different, and goes
deeper. The tradition had never doubted the intelligibility of the notion of
determinate concepts that were fully adequate to expressing judgments that
were simply true. Hegel does. The conceptual inexhaustibility of sensuous
immediacy shows itself precisely in the impossibility of stably capturing how
things are using any set of determinate concepts. If we correctly apply any
such set long enough, they will eventually show their inadequacy by leading
us to embrace commitments that are material incompatible according to the
lights of the norms implicit in those very concepts. At the core of Hegel’s view
is not only an epistemic, but a deep semantic fallibilism. As far as our
determinate empirical and practical concepts are concerned, we are born in
sin, and doomed to die in sin. (I think this aspect of Hegel’s thought has not
been much remarked upon because of a failure to keep two sets of books: one
on his views of determinate empirical and practical concepts, the other on the
logical, speculative, philosophical metaconcepts whose distinctive expressive
job it is to make explicit what is going on when we apply the ground-level
concepts. Hegel does think that there can be a stable, adequate battery of the
latter.) 15
So contradicting ourselves—endorsing materially incompatible
commitments—is unavoidable. But it is still a kind of sin; there is something
wrong with finding ourselves in such a state. For we are normatively obliged,
when we do find ourselves with materially incompatible commitments, to
remedy the situation: to groom our commitments, including the inferential
ones that articulate the contents of our concepts, so as to eliminate the
contradiction. We must make distinctions, refine our concepts, relinquish
some judgments, so as to remove or repair the contradiction. That is why the

15
I have explored these ideas further in “Sketch of a Program for a Critical Reading of Hegel”
[Internationales Jahrbuch des Deutschen Idealismus, Vol 3, 2005, pp. 131-161].
18 | ROBERT B. BRANDOM

same relations of determinate negation that articulate the determinate

contents of our concepts are also the motor of change of our conceptually
articulated commitments—both at the level of judgments and the level of
inference, hence at the level of concepts themselves. Determinate (and
determining) negation is what makes Vernunft dynamic. It is the source of
conceptual change. Insofar as the merely formal law of noncontradiction
expresses, however inadequately, the overarching normative obligation to
repair material incompatibilities when they are encountered, it is correct—as
far as it goes.
But we should not conclude from the fact that we are fated to discover the
inadequacy and incorrectness of every set of determinate concepts we deploy
that we are on a path of despair. On the contrary, the experience of error is
the way of enlightenment. It is how we improve our understanding, craft
better concepts-and-commitments, come to track more closely what really,
objectively follows from what and excludes what, in the inferences and
incompatibilities we subjectively endorse. This is the truth-process, the path
of truth (“the movement of the life of truth”16). But we must give up the idea
of truth as a destination, as a state or property that some time-slice of our
commitments can have. “Truth is not a minted coin that can be given and
pocketed ready-made.”17 “Truth is its own self-movement.”18 That static,
stable conception belongs to the standpoint of Verstand, not of Vernunft. In
a memorable characterization (admittedly something less than a definition),
Hegel says:

Truth is a vast Bacchanalian revel, with not a soul sober; yet because each member
collapses as soon as he drops out, the revel is just as much transparent and simple repose.
Judged in the court of this movement, the single shapes of Spirit do not persist any more
than determinate thoughts do.19

16
Phenomenology, Preface, paragraph 47.
17
Phenomenology, Preface, paragraph 39.
18
Phenomenology, Preface, paragraph 48.
19
Phenomenology, Preface, paragraph 47.
 HEGEL AND ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY | 19

That every commitment is liable to being found to collide with another, and
so to be rejected means that as this process, “truth includes the negative.”20
This is not a coherence theory of truth—though there is a coherence theory
of meaning in the background. For classical coherence theories of truth, like
their rival, correspondence theories, share a commitment to truth as an
achievable state or property (truth as “rigid, dead propositions”21). It is
something much more radical and interesting. What matters is the process,
not the product.
Redding’s fascinating book is an important progressive step in such a
truth process. By identifying, refining, and reconciling various material
incompatibilities between them (both real and merely rumored), it
inaugurates a new phase in the ongoing conversation between analytic
philosophy and Hegelian ideas—a conversation we can now clearly see was
not closed off once and for all by the Manichean spin Russell gave to it a
century ago.

ROBERT B. BRANDOM
Philosophy Department
1001 Cathedral of Learning
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
[email protected]

References
Brandom, Robert B. (2005). “Sketch of a Program for a Critical Reading of
Hegel”. Internationales Jahrbuch des Deutschen Idealismus 3: pp. 131-
161.
Brandom, Robert B. (2008). Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic
Pragmatism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

20
Phenomenology, Preface, paragraph 48.
21
Phenomenology, Preface, paragraph 45.
20 | ROBERT B. BRANDOM

Brandom, Robert B. (2009). Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Frege, Gotlob (1879). Begriffsschrift, eine der arithmetischen nachgebildete
Formelsprache des reinen Denkens, Halle a. S.: Louis Nebert. Translated
as Concept Script, a formal language of pure thought modelled upon that
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Frege to Gödel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879–1931.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967.
Hegel, G.W.F. (1977). Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A.V. Miller.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Macbeth, Danielle (2005). Frege’s Logic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Paul Redding (2007). Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian
Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Russell, Bertrand (1914). Our Knowledge of the External World. London:
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