Modal Foundationalism in Brandom´s Interpretation of Hegel

Abstract

Brandom’s reading of Hegel’s metaphysics offers an excitingly rich inter-pretation within the context of contemporary modal metaphysics. Brandom reads Hegel’s determinate negation in the way that the concepts of material incompatibility and ma-terial consequence relations operate. Brandom recognizes incompatibility as a modal concept and places it as a primitive in the foundation of Hegel’s metaphysics. This paper examines of Brandom’s modal foundationalist claim in comparison to how Hegel conceives of moda-lity in his Logic. Upon this examination, the paper suggests that Brandom’s interpretation remains problematically indifferent to the anti-foundationalist aspect of Hegel’s Logic and Hegel’s understanding of modality.