Robert Pippin

'Modernity' has come to refer both to a contested historical category and to an even more contested philosophical and civilisational ideal. In this important collection of essays Robert Pippin takes issue with some prominent assessments of what is or is not philosophically at stake in the idea of a modern revolution in Western civilisation, and presents an alternative view. Professor Pippin disputes many traditional characterisations of the distinctiveness of modern philosophy. In their place he defends claims about agency, freedom, ethical life and modernity itself, all of which are central to the German idealist philosophical tradition, and in particular, to the writings of Hegel. Having considered the Hegelian version of these issues the author explores other accounts as found in Habermas, Strauss, Blumenberg, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.

The belated genre classification, “film noir,” is a contested one, much more so than “Western” or “musical.”2 However, there is wide agreement that there were many stylistic conventions common to the new treatment of crime dramas prominent in the 1940s: grim urban settings, often very cramped interiors, predominantly night time scenes, and so-called “low key” lighting and unusual camera angles.3 But there were also important thematic elements in common.Two are especially interesting. First, noirs were almost always about crime, usually murder, often cold-blooded, well-thought-out murder. Even more surprisingly, the larger social context for such deeds, the historical American world in which they take place, was itself just as bleak, amoral, and ugly as the individual deeds and the characters themselves. Secondly, and perhaps most distinctively, many films challenged, in sometimes startling ways, many of our most familiar assumptions about psychological explanation. In ways that seemed both mysterious and credible, characters who had been righteous, stable, and paragons of responsibility all their adult lives were seamlessly and quite believably transformed in a few seconds into reckless, dangerous, and even murderous types, all suggesting that anyone, in the right (or wrong) circumstances, was capable of almost anything, and that one’s own sincere avowals of basic principles could be ludicrously self-deceived.4 This last theme—that a virtuous character can be as much a matter of moral luck (of having avoided by mere chance the particular temptation that would reveal the fragility of one’s principles) as an individual accomplishment—is connected with an even larger philosophical issue.

Among Kant's innovations in the understanding of logic (‘general logic’) were his claims that logic had no content of its own, but was the form of the thought of any possible content, and that the unit of meaning, the truth-bearer, judgement, was essentially apperceptive. Judging was implicitly the consciousness of judging. This was for Kant a logical truth. This article traces the influence of the latter claim on Fichte, and, for most of the discussion, on Hegel. The aim is to understand the relations among self-consciousness, reason and freedom in the idealist tradition

As McDowell makes clear in ‘On Pippin’s Postscript’ and in many other works, the interpretive question at issue in this exchange—how to understand the relation between Kant and Hegel, especially as that concerns Kant’s central ‘Deduction’ argument in the Critique of Pure Reason1—brings into the foreground an even larger problem on which all the others depend: the right way to understand at the highest level of generality the relation between active or spontaneous thought and our receptive and corporeal sensibility and bodily embodiment. From Mind and World on, McDowell has indicated that this is in fact a problem so inclusive as to be common to theoretical and practical philosophy; that the issue of how thought informs our sensibility is at bottom the same (raises the same logical or conceptual issue) as the issue of how thought could be said to inform, to be active ‘in’, bodily action; that we can be in the grip of the same bad, misleading picture in accounting for executing an intention as in accounting for acquiring perceptual knowledge.2 I agree with, and follow his lead in, setting the basic framework for the particular issues in just this way. With matters so set out, there are two main areas of disagreement: (i) how to state the role of concepts and especially conceptual activity in the sensible uptake of the world and (ii) what to make of Hegel’s claim for a speculative ‘identity’ between inner and outer in action, or how to state the role of intentions ‘in’ bodily activity. In both cases, McDowell thinks I go too far; too far in terms of what is philosophically correct, and too far in attributing those positions to Hegel. It is the former topic that is in play in this exchange, although elements of the latter arise as well. There is first an issue lingering from the first exchange in Reading McDowell.

Many philosophers have been suspicious of any “transcendental argument”. In the literature concerned with arguments such as Kant’s Transcendental Deduction, or the “private language” or “other minds” argument, there have been frequent charges that such attempts are “impossible,” spurious, or, even more frequently, incomplete, that their success depends on some controversial philosophical position, such as verificationism. A recent addition to the latter kind of charge is that a successful TA must involve a commitment to some form of idealism. This is, prima facie, quite a reasonable suspicion. Any argument about the necessary conditions of our belief can tell us something about objects in the world, it would seem, only if it can also be shown that the existence of such objects depends on our beliefs. Moreover, Kant, the originator of the modern form of antiskeptical TA’s, was also a famous idealist, adding to the suspicion. Bernard Williams has argued for this connection in recent articles on Wittgenstein and Shoemaker, and more recently, Ross Harrison, in “Transcendental Arguments and Idealism,” has tried to deny that there is such a connection and to argue that there can be a successful TA without any commitment to idealism. There may be some form of a TA that is nonidealistic, but an examination of Harrison’s case will reveal, I think, not only that he has not discovered such an argument, but that it is unlikely that there could be such a TA, except in trivial cases. Moreover, I also want to show that a consideration of his argument can be of help in discovering what kind of idealism is or is not involved in TA’s, especially in Kant, and what problems are apparent in that version of idealism.

This series makes available in English some important work by German philosophers on major figures in the German philosophical tradition. The volumes will provide critical perspectives on philosophers of great significance to the Anglo-American philosophical community, perspectives that have been largely ignored except by a handful of writers on German philosophy. The dissemination of this work will be of enormous value to Anglophone students and scholars of the history of German philosophy. This collection brings together in translation the finest post-war German language scholarship on Hegel's social and political philosophy, concentrating on the Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Many of the essays appear in English here for the first time; all are translated anew.

Kant says there is a duty to exit the state of nature, to enter into a civil state. He says this is a duty of right, not a duty of virtue. The article discusses the argument he gives to support this view, as well as the contemporary discussion on the relationship between this duty of right and the categorical imperative. The discussion is full of implications. Particularly significant is the view of the Kantian state emerging from it, which challenges the conventional account: instead of a state designed to protect pre-existing individual property rights, property rights are seen as something resulting from the very constitution of the state.

In this pathbreaking book one of America’s most distinguished philosophers brilliantly explores the status and authority of law and the nature of political allegiance through close readings of three classic Hollywood Westerns: Howard Hawks’ _Red River_ and John Ford’s _The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance_ and _The Searchers._ Robert Pippin treats these films as sophisticated mythic accounts of a key moment in American history: its “second founding,” or the western expansion. His central question concerns how these films explore classical problems in political psychology, especially how the virtues of a commercial republic gained some hold on individuals at a time when the heroic and martial virtues were so important. Westerns, Pippin shows, raise central questions about the difference between private violence and revenge and the state’s claim to a legitimate monopoly on violence, and they show how these claims come to be experienced and accepted or rejected. Pippin’s account of the best Hollywood Westerns brings this genre into the center of the tradition of political thought, and his readings raise questions about political psychology and the political passions that have been neglected in contemporary political thought in favor of a limited concern with the question of legitimacy.

As a representative of the humanities, I understood my charge this afternoon to be to offer some sort of response to what is at the very least a book publishing or market phenomenon – the flood of recent books especially in the last decade by neuroscientists, primatologists, computer scientists, evolutionary biologists and economists about what had traditionally been considered issues in the humanities - issues like morality, politics, the nature of rationality, what makes a response to an object an aesthetic response, and value theory - and the incorporation of such research methods by academics traditionally thought of as humanists. The organizers of our symposium have singled out for special attention the themes of autonomy, creativity and singularity, as these have come to be treated in these new interdisciplinary ways. I do not in any way count myself an expert in this emerging literature, but I do want to try to offer some initial and very general reasons to hesitate before jumping on this particular bandwagon.

Hegel is the most prominent philosopher who argued that 'philosophy is its own time comprehended in thought', and he argued for this with an elaborate theory about the necessarily historical and experiential content of normative principles and ideals, especially, in his own historical period, the ideal of a free life. His insistence that philosophy must attend to the 'actuality' of the norms it considers is quite controversial, often accused of accommodation with the status quo, a 'might makes right' theory of history, and the abandonment of philosophy's critical and reflective task. In this article, I explore Hegel's case for this position in his Phenomenology of Spirit, using as a model for his argument his account of the way the intention of an action can only be properly understood as it is 'actualized' in an action, and I consider some of the standard objections in the light of this model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]\nCopyright of Inquiry is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to alls.)