Robert B. Pippin | |
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Born |
Portsmouth, Virginia |
September 14, 1948
Alma mater | Pennsylvania State University |
Era | Contemporary philosophy |
Region | Western Philosophy |
School | Analytic |
Main interests
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History of philosophy, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, modernity |
Notable ideas
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Criticism of structuralism |
Influences
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Influenced
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Robert Buford Pippin (born September 14, 1948) is an American philosopher. He is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago.
Pippin earned his BA in English from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. and his Ph.D. in philosophy from Penn State under the direction of Stanley Rosen. Before moving to Chicago, he taught for a number of years in the department of philosophy at UCSD, where he counted Henry Allison and Herbert Marcuse among his colleagues. In 2009 he held the Spinoza Chair of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. Since 2014 he is PhD honoris causa at Uppsala University, Sweden. He currently resides in Chicago with his wife Joan.
Pippin is best known for his work on Hegel, although has also published articles and books on Kant, Nietzsche, Proust, Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss and Henry James.
His 1989 book Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness was a major contribution to Hegel studies. In it Pippin portrays Hegel as a thinker with fewer metaphysical commitments than are traditionally attributed. Hegel's claims about the "Absolute" and "Spirit" are interpreted in a vein more epistemological than ontological. Much of Hegel's project, in Pippin's reading, is a continuation rather than a reversal of the Kantian critique of dogmatic metaphysics.
Such a revisionist reading of Hegel has gained a following recently, inspiring important works by Terry Pinkard, Paul Redding and others, as well as influencing less historically-oriented philosophers of mind such as John McDowell and Robert Brandom. A similar movement to interpret Hegel as a "category-theorist" has been inspired in Germany by Klaus Hartmann.