hegel, philosophy, and music 123in the right context without their being conveyed in terms of discur-
sive entitlements and commitments. In some contexts and for some
purposes we assess such responses in the terms Brandom brilliantly
characterises, but this is at a secondary level. If we consider someone’s
characterisation of what they think is conveyed by the passage from the
Rasumovsky Quartet discussed above, we will be in the discursive game
Brandom describes. However, this game is parasitic on the fact that the
music matters because of the way it connects to, articulates, and evokes
aspects of life which would not be accessible without the music itself
and its immediate effects on its listeners. The wider significance of this
issue for modern philosophy becomes apparent in Hegel’s response to
music.
Hegel and the content of musicBrandom’s inferentialism has played a role in the recent rehabilitation
of Hegel’s philosophy. It comes closer to the emphatically rationalist
side of Hegel that is underplayed, for example, in Pinkard’s more com-
munitarian readings. Hegel’s own remarks on music show that the ideas
which Brandom adopts for his account of immediacy and mediation
are indeed directly connected to his understanding of music: ‘notes
are in themselves a totality of differences, which can divide themselves
and combine themselves into the most multiple kinds of direct conso-
nances, essential oppositions, contradictions and mediations’ (Hegel
1965 : 2 , 273 ).^8 However, there is a crucial difference between Hegel
and Brandom. Brandom’s project is part of a widening of the scope
of analytical philosophy in the light of the decline of empiricism, and
it is explicitly only a beginning. The nature of what he undertakes is,
though, still dictated in some respects by the agenda of the analytical
style of philosophy which resulted from the failure of Hegelian ambi-
tions for philosophy to respond to the full spectrum of the demands
made by modernity. The very idea that a philosopher from the tradition
to which Brandom belongs would pay the kind of sustained attention
to aesthetics which Hegel did in later life might well now seem odd to
us. However, if context is as important to philosophy as inferentialism
8 Discussion of Hegel on music has recently been affected by the publication of reliable
transcripts of hisLectures on the Philosophy of Art(Hegel 2003 ), which I use extensively here
because they are not subject to the textual problems associated with the Hotho edition
of theAesthetics(Hegel 1965 ).