According to the usual story, analytic philosophy was born when Bertrand Russell revolted against a version of Hegel’s idealism that had dominated the Cambridge philosophy scene. So how is it that around 100 years later, Robert Brandom, an influential philosopher grappling with technical debates at the heart of analytic philosophy, publishes an 856-page book dedicated to interpreting Hegel? Paul Redding explains how Russell’s failed attempt to use Gottlob Frege’s logic as a foundation not only for mathematics, but for the natural sciences, ended up calling for solutions found in Hegel’s philosophy.   

In 2019, the American philosopher Robert Brandom published his long-awaited interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, entitled, “A Spirit of Trust”. While many others have offered interpretations of this massively ambitious and daunting work from the early nineteenth century, none have elaborated its messages on the basis of a philosophical theory they themselves had forged in the context of highly technical debates at the heart of contemporary analytic philosophy. Brandom’s attraction to Hegel seems to have been from the start inextricably bound up with what had drawn him to heroes of analytic philosophy such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, W. V. O. Quine, Wilfrid Sellars, and Donald Davidson—typical of the figures engaged with in his 1994 game-changing treatise in the philosophy of language, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing and Discursive Commitment. Many would have scratched their heads: How could such apparently antithetical approaches as Hegel’s “absolute idealism” and contemporary analytic philosophy ever come to occupy the same intellectual space?