A Spirit of Trust

“[A] masterpiece.”—Slavoj Žižek, Philosophy Now

“Displays the swashbuckling speculation and hermeneutical ingenuity of the best continental philosophy together with the rigor of the best analytic work… [An] astonishing book. Brandom develops fundamentally original positions with implications for everything from narrative theory to the free will problem to the nature of the political state.”—Crispin Sartwell, The Los Angeles Review of Books

“Must now count as Brandom’s most significant contribution to contemporary philosophy… [An] impressive book.”—Stephen Houlgate, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

“Brandom’s goal is to make Hegel explicable to a new audience, to make the importance of his philosophy plain and to further develop his own impressive body of work. He has succeeded, and his success throws up fascinating questions for both American philosophy and critical theory.”—J. D. Evans, Marx and Philosophy Review of Books

“This long-awaited book has been thirty years in the making. Brandom’s A Spirit of Trust aspires to do for Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit what Strawson’s The Bounds of Sense did for Kant’s The Critique of Pure Reason: to transpose a seminal work of German Idealism into the terminological idiom and argumentative key of anglophone analytic philosophy—not only to render a past classic newly available to the present, but to transform the philosophical present through such a re-inheritance of its past.”—James Conant, University of Chicago

“A Spirit of Trust will be the book that finally moves analytic philosophy from its Kantian phase to its Hegelian phase. Brandom has succeeded in bridging both the history–systematic and the continental–analytic divides in contemporary philosophy. To say that this book is highly anticipated would be a gross understatement.”—Dean Moyar, Johns Hopkins University