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Wretzel Wins Humboldt

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Wretzel Wins Humboldt

Wretzel Wins Humboldt

Lecturer Joshua Wretzel was awarded a Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship to spend six months studying in Heidelberg, Germany.   Dr. Wretzel will devote his time in Heidelberg to complete two chapters of his book manuscript, tentatively titled Hegel, Hermeneutics, and Inferentialism.  This project criticizes the way Hegel’s thought has been appropriated for use in contemporary debates about language and sociality.  Philosophers like Robert Brandom tend to think that finding Hegel’s relevance in these matters requires disentangling a salvageable philosophy of language from an outmoded systematic idealism.  I challenge, first, the hermeneutic presuppositions that license this form of “disentangling”; and second, the notion that Hegel’s systematic apparatus is some sort of fusty remnant of a bygone philosophical age.  In fact, as Wretzel argues, a reading of Hegel that takes seriously his systematic aspirations may place his thought in critical tension with Brandom’s inferentialist enterprise.