This fresh and original book argues that the central questions in Hegel's practical philosophy are the central questions in modern accounts of freedom: What is freedom, or what would it be to act ...freely? Is it possible so to act? And how important is leading a free life? Robert Pippin argues that the core of Hegel's answers is a social theory of agency, the view that agency is not exclusively a matter of the self-relation and self-determination of an individual but requires the right sort of engagement with and recognition by others. Using a detailed analysis of key Hegelian texts, he develops this interpretation to reveal the bearing of Hegel's claims on many contemporary issues, including much-discussed core problems in the liberal democratic tradition. His important study will be valuable for all readers who are interested in Hegel's philosophy and in the modern problems of agency and freedom.
The Persistence of Subjectivity examines several approaches to, and critiques of, the core notion in the self-understanding and legitimation of the modern, 'bourgeois' form of life: the free, ...reflective, self-determining subject. Since it is a relatively recent historical development that human beings think of themselves as individual centers of agency, and that one's entitlement to such a self-determining life is absolutely valuable, the issue at stake also involves the question of the historical location of philosophy. What might it mean to take seriously Hegel's claim that philosophical reflection is always reflection on the historical 'actuality' of its own age? Discussing Heidegger, Gadamer, Adorno, Leo Strauss, Manfred Frank, and John McDowell, Robert Pippin attempts to understand how subjectivity arises in contemporary institutional practices such as medicine, as well as in other contexts such as modernism in the visual arts and in the novels of Marcel Proust.
In the most influential chapter of his most important philosophical work, the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel makes the central and disarming assertions that "self-consciousness is desire itself" and ...that it attains its "satisfaction" only in another self-consciousness. Hegel on Self-Consciousness presents a groundbreaking new interpretation of these revolutionary claims, tracing their roots to Kant's philosophy and demonstrating their continued relevance for contemporary thought. As Robert Pippin shows, Hegel argues that we must understand Kant's account of the self-conscious nature of consciousness as a claim in practical philosophy, and that therefore we need radically different views of human sentience, the conditions of our knowledge of the world, and the social nature of subjectivity and normativity. Pippin explains why this chapter of Hegel's Phenomenology should be seen as the basis of much later continental philosophy and the Marxist, neo-Marxist, and critical-theory traditions. He also contrasts his own interpretation of Hegel's assertions with influential interpretations of the chapter put forward by philosophers John McDowell and Robert Brandom. Robert B. Pippin is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought and in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. His books include Hegel's Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life and Henry James and Modern Moral Life.
O presente artigo toma como diretriz uma pergunta fundamental: o que significa ver a filosofia do ponto de vista de uma vida afirmável e sustentável? Com base nessa pergunta, examina-se a natureza da ...alternativa filosófica proposta por Nietzsche ao ascetismo entranhado no âmago da filosofia ocidental, a autoridade com que esta alternativa é enunciada, bem como a relação existente entre a referida alternativa e o ascetismo por ela radicalmente criticado.
In his influential series of lectures on Nietzsche in the nineteen-thirties and nineteen-forties, Heidegger claimed that Nietzsche had failed to escape metaphysical thinking and had remained a ...metaphysician despite his own self-understanding. At the center of Heidegger’s charge is his interpretation of Nietzsche’s doctrine of “the will to power.” The argument in this paper is that Heidegger has misinterpreted what Nietzsche means by a “philosophy of the future,” and that Nietzsche’s revolution in philosophy is, somewhat ironically, much closer to Heidegger’s own attempt to recover the question of the meaning of being.
How do we distinguish what people do from what merely happens to them? Looking at several film noirs--including close readings of three classics of the genre, Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street, Orson ...Welles's The Lady from Shanghai, and Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past--Pippin reveals the ways in which these works explore the declining credibility of individuals as causal centers of agency, and how we live with the acknowledgment of such limitations.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) is one of the most important philosophers of the last two hundred years, whose writings, both published and unpublished, have had a formative influence on virtually ...all aspects of modern culture. This volume offers introductory essays on all of Nietzsche's completed works and also his unpublished notebooks. The essays address such topics as his criticism of morality and Christianity, his doctrines of the will to power and the eternal recurrence, his perspectivism, his theories of tragedy and nihilism and his thoughts on ancient and modern culture. Written by internationally recognized scholars, they provide the interested reader with an up-to-date and authoritative overview of the thought of this fascinating figure.
Pippin examines J. M. Coetzee's novel, Childhood of Jesus. Three prominent aspects of the novel are essential in trying to understand the story and the title: the major elements of the plot, the ...content of the many conversations, and the intertextual formal structure. This complicated and nearly omnipresent intertextuality raises the issue of the significance of literature itself, and the place of the imaginary in human life. Moreover, Pippin finds that there are other references to the New Testament and to Christianity in Coetzee's novel.
Kant says there is a duty to exit the state of nature and enter into a civil state: a duty of right (Rechtspflicht), not a duty of virtue. The article examines the argument he provides in support of ...this view, as well as contemporary discussion of the relationship between this duty of right and the categorical imperative. From this analysis emerges a distinctive view of the Kantian state that challenges the conventional account: rather than defining the state as a protector of pre-existing individual property rights, property rights are seen as stemming from the constitution of the state.
Doer and Deed Pippin, Robert
Journal of Nietzsche studies,
07/2013, Letnik:
44, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Under the press of questions and comments by Christa Davis Acampora and R. Lanier Anderson, I attempt here to clarify the understanding of human agency that I attribute to Nietzsche in my ...book,Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy. A central issue concerns what Nietzsche means inGenealogyI:13, in his famous “lightning-flash” metaphor. I argue that the task posed to us by this passage is to understand it in a way that is consistent with Nietzsche's genealogies and critiques, all of which involve psychological explanations, and so suggest a psychological model of motivated agency, consistent with what appears to beGMI:13's denial of the basic presupposition of the notion of agency: a distinction between the doer, as instigator of the bodily movement, and the deed. Against objections, I defend the claim that Nietzsche proposes an “expressivist” account that preserves the notion of agency.
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