Robert B. Pippin is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books and articles on German idealism and later German philosophy, including Kant's Theory of Form; Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness; Modernism as a Philosophical Problem; and Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations. In addition he has published on issues in political philosophy, theories of self-consciousness, the nature of conceptual change, and the problem of freedom. He also wrote a book about literature and philosophy: Henry James and Modern Moral Life. A collection of his essays in German, Die Verwirklichung der Freiheit, appeared in 2005, as did The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath, and his book on Nietzsche, Nietzsche, moraliste français: La conception nietzschéenne d'une psychologie philosophique, appeared in 2006. Fatalism in American Film Noir: Some Cinematic Philosophy appeared in 2012. He was twice an Alexander von Humboldt fellow, is a winner of the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award in the Humanities, and was recently a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a member of the American Philosophical Society. He is also a member of the German National Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Selected Publications
The Philosophical Hitchcock: Vertigo and the Anxieties of Unknowingness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017)
Die Aktualität des Deutschen Idealismus (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2017)
Interanimations: Receiving Modern German Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2015)
After the Beautiful. Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013)
Kunst als Philosophie. Hegel und die Philosophie der modernen Bildkunst (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2012)
Introductions to Nietzsche, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)
Fatalism in American Film Noir: Some Cinematic Philosophy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012)
Hegel on Self-Consciousness. Desire and Death in the 'Phenomenology of Spirit' (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Italian Translation, 2015
Hollywood Westerns and American Myth: The Importance of Howard Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosophy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010) - Link
Hegel's Concept of Self-Consciousness, 2009 Spinoza Lectures (Amsterdam: van Gorcum, 2010) - Link
Nietzsche, Psychology, First Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010) - Link; Spanish Translation, 2015
Hegel's Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life (Cambridge University Press, 2008) - Link
Media
Robert Pippin's recorded lectures & interviews
Recent Courses
PHIL 28006/38006 Philosophical Fiction: Proust's In Search of Lost Time
We will discuss all seven volumes of Proust's magisterial novel, In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927). In order to be able to do so in a ten week quarter, students must announce their intention to register for the course before the end of the Spring quarter of 2018, and pledge to have read the entire novel before the March, 2019 beginning of the seminar. (They can do so by emailing Robert Pippin at rbp1@uchicago.edu.) The novel is well known for its treatment of a large number of philosophical issues: including self-identity over time, the nature of memory, social competition and snobbery, the nature of love, both romantic and familial, the role of fantasy in human life, the nature and prevalence of jealousy, the nature and value of art, the chief characteristics of bourgeois society, and the nature of lived temporality. Our interest will be not only in these issues but also in what could be meant by the notion of a novelistic "treatment" of the issues, and how such a treatment might bear on philosophy as traditionally understood. We shall use the Modern Library boxed set of seven volumes for the English translation, and for those students with French, we will use the Folio Collection paperbacks of the seven volumes. (I)
PHIL 55550 Film and Philosophy: Issues in Melodrama
The general question to be addressed: might film (realist fictional narratives especially) be a reflective form of thought, and if so, might that form of reflection be considered a philosophical one? The genre to be interrogated with this question in mind will be melodramas, narratives of great suffering and extreme emotional experiences, the best of which explore how we might make sense of such suffering. A prominent question: the difference between tragedy and melodrama, and the bearing of that difference on the general question. We shall watch several films in connection with these questions, including Max Ophuls's Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), King Vidor's Stella Dallas (1937), Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life (1959), Written on the Wind (1956), and Rainer Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972). We shall also explore different cinematic treatments of a common melodramatic plot, and consider together Sirk's All that Heaven Allows (1955), Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), and Todd Haynes's Far from Heaven (2002), the last two of which are variations on Sirk's plot. Readings will include Stanley Cavell's The World Viewed and Contesting Tears, essays by André Bazin, work by Peter Brooks, Fassbinder, and Thomas Elsaesser, and selected essays on the films. (I)
For full list of Robert Pippin's courses back to the 2012-13 academic year, see our searchable course database.