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103Kant's theory of value: On Allen wood's Kant's ethical thoughtInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 43 (2). 2000.No abstract
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101Hegel's metaphysics and the problem of contradictionJournal of the History of Philosophy 16 (3): 301-312. 1978.
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92What Is a Western? Politics and Self-Knowledge in John Ford's The SearchersCritical Inquiry 35 (2): 223-253. 2009.
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92Nietzsche, Psychology, and First PhilosophyUniversity of Chicago Press. 2010.Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most elusive thinkers in the philosophical tradition. His highly unusual style and insistence on what remains hidden or unsaid in his writing make pinning him to a particular position tricky. Nonetheless, certain readings of his work have become standard and influential. In this major new interpretation of Nietzsche’s work, Robert B. Pippin challenges various traditional views of Nietzsche, taking him at his word when he says that his writing can best be underst…Read more
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80Can there be 'unprincipled virtue'? Comments on Nomy ArpalyPhilosophical Explorations 10 (3). 2007.In her book, Unprincipled Virtue, Nomy Arpaly is suspicious of reflective endorsement or deliberative rationality views of agency, those which tie the possibility of responsibility and moral blame to the conscious exercise of deliberation and reflection, and which require as a condition of blame- or praise- worthiness an agent's explicit commitment to ethical principles. I am in sympathy with her attack on standard autonomy theories, but argue that she confuses the phenomenon of unknowing and un…Read more
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80Medical Practice and Social AuthorityJournal of Medicine and Philosophy 21 (4): 417-437. 1996.Questions of medical ethics are often treated as especially difficult casuistical problems or as difficult cases illustrative of paradoxes or advantages in global moral theories. I argue here, in opposition to such approaches, for the inseparability of questions of social history and social theory from any normative assessment of medical practices. The focus of the discussion is the question of the legitimacy of the social authority exercised by physicians, and the insufficiency of traditional d…Read more
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78Nietzsche and the origin of the idea of modernismInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 26 (2). 1983.The notion of modernism, originally a classificatory term in art and literary criticism, now a common term of art in many philosophic (and anti?philosophic) programs, has remained an elusive, often vague point of view. For a discussion of the notion's historical accuracy and philosophic legitimacy this article selects an author greatly responsible for setting out the problem (called by him ?nihilism') and philosophically sensitive to the issues involved in claiming that something essential to a …Read more
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77Negation and Not-Being in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and Plato’s SophistKant Studien 70 (1-4): 179-196. 1979.
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76Hegel on Self-Consciousness: Desire and Death in the Phenomenology of Spirit: Desire and Death in the Phenomenology of SpiritPrinceton University Press. 2010.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 Pippi…Read more
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75What Is a Western? Politics and Self-Knowledge in John Ford's The SearchersCritical Inquiry 35 (2): 223-253. 2009.
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75The question of freedom in the modern German tradition is not just a metaphysical question. It concerns the status of a free life as a value, indeed, as they took to saying, the “absolute” value. A free life is of unconditional and incomparable and inestimable value, and it is the basis of the unique, and again, absolute, unqualifiable respect owed to any human person just as such. This certainly increases the pressure on anyone who espouses such a view to tell us what a free life consists in. K…Read more
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74Hegel, Modernity, and HabermasThe Monist 74 (3): 329-357. 1991.Characterizing Hegel’s complex assessment of modernity has always depended on which texts one looks at, and how one understands the “modernity problem.” It is obvious enough that Hegel’s pre-Jena and early Jena writings do indeed partly reflect what Nietzsche called a kind of German “homesickness,” a distaste with Enlightenment “positivity,” and an appeal to the models of the Greek polis and the early Christian communities as ways of understanding, by contrast, the limitations of modern philosop…Read more
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74Blumenberg and the Modernity ProblemReview of Metaphysics 40 (3). 1987.In the long aftermath of such modernist suspicions about the still dominant "official" Enlightenment culture, the very title of the recently translated book by Hans Blumenberg is a bluntly direct invitation to controversy--The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. For Blumenberg, when Giordano Bruno, condemned to burn at the stake in 1600, defiantly turned his face from a crucifix offered him as a last chance at redemption, the heroic gesture should be seen as just that, heroic and historically decisive…Read more
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73The 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 …Read more
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71Reconstructivism: On Honneth’s HegelianismPhilosophy and Social Criticism 40 (8): 725-741. 2014.In this paper I express enthusiastic solidarity with Axel Honneth's inheritance and transformation of several core Hegelian ideas, and express one major disagreement. The disagreement is not so much with anything he says, as it is with what he doesn't say. It concerns his rejection of Hegel's theoretical philosophy, and so his attempt to reconstruct Hegel's practical philosophy without reliance on that theoretical philosophy. This attitude towards Hegel's Science of Logic – that it involves a “m…Read more
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68All for one and one for allPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 103 (3): 728-733. 2021.Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 103, Issue 3, Page 728-733, November 2021.
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64Idealism and the Problem of Finitude: Heidegger and HegelIn Jure Simoniti & Gregor Kroupa (eds.), Ideas and Idealism in Philosophy, De Gruyter. pp. 127-150. 2023.
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62Naturalness and mindedness: Hegel' compatibilismEuropean Journal of Philosophy 7 (2). 1999.The problem of freedom in modern philosophy has three basic components: (i) what is freedom, or what would it be to act freely? (ii) Is it possible so to act? (iii) And how important is leading a free life?1 Hegel proposed unprecedented and highly controversial answers to these questions.
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612. Hegel, Freedom, The Will: The Philosophy of Right: §§ 1–33In Ludwig Siep (ed.), G. W. F. Hegel: Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag. pp. 31-54. 2014.
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58Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth Century FrancePhilosophical Review 99 (1): 129. 1990.
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56Theory’s Empire: Reflections on a Vocation for Critical InquiryCritical Inquiry 30 (2): 396. 2004.
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54"Critical Inquiry" and Critical Theory: A Short History of NonbeingCritical Inquiry 30 (2): 424. 2004.
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54Hegel on Political Philosophy and Political ActualityInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 53 (5): 401-416. 2010.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 r…Read more
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52Being, Time, and Politics: The Strauss-Kojeve DebateHistory and Theory 32 (2): 138-161. 1993.The 1963 publication in English of Leo Strauss's study of Xenophon's dialogue, Hiero, or Tyrannicus, also contained a critical review of Strauss's interpretation by the French philosopher and civil servant, Alexandre Kojève, and a "Restatement" of his position by Strauss. This odd triptych, with a complex statement of the classical position on tyranny in the middle, Strauss's defense of classical philosophy on one side, and Kojève's defense of a radically historicist, revolutionary Hegel on the …Read more
Chicago, Illinois, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
19th Century Philosophy |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Aesthetics |
19th Century Philosophy |
Continental Philosophy |