Robert Pippin

I am very grateful to both commentators for these thoughtful and stimulating questions and remarks and especially for the care and generous charity animating their summations of the position I defend in the book. That has not always been the case in discussions of the book.Both critics rightly note the importance of the French moralistes in my attempt to understand why Nietzsche should have said that “psychology” might now (that is, for him) become once again the “queen of the sciences” and so once more the “path to the fundamental problems.” My purpose in invoking the tradition of Pascal, LaRochefoucauld, and above all Montaigne, aside from the fact that Nietzsche’s frequent praise of that tradition and ..

One of the most discussed and disputed claims in John McDowell’s Mind and World is the claim that we should not think that in experience, “conceptual capacities are exercised on non-conceptual deliverances of sensibility.” Rather, “Conceptual capacities are already operative in the deliverances of sensibility themselves.” Such capacities are said to be operative, but not in the same way they are operative when the faculty of assertoric judgment is explicitly exercised. This position preserves the passivity and receptivity necessary for McDowell to defend a picture of our thought as constrained by the world. (“The constraints come from outside thinking, but not from outside what is thinkable.”) And it maintains his Sellarsean criticism of the “Myth of the Given,” such that when we trace justification back we do not reach something that, because non-conceptual, could not play any role in such justification. The fact that the deliverances of sensibility are conceptually shaped (I will take this mean “have a conceptual form”) insures that sensibility can indeed play such a justificatory role in perceptual beliefs

The 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. Kant’s famous answer is “autonomy,” where this means first or minimally freedom from external constraint, coercion and intimidation (“thinking for yourself”), but even more importantly, being in a certain specific sort of self-relation. I can only be said truly to be “ruling myself” when the considerations that determine what I do are reasons. But if, finally, in exercising reason I am merely rationally responsive to inclinations and desires and aversions, I am letting such contingent impulses “rule” my life, however strategically rational or hierarchically ordered my plans for satisfaction turn out to be. So, Kant concludes, I am only truly autonomous, self-ruling, when the one consideration of importance (that is, normatively authoritative) in what I do is, as he says so frequently if still mysteriously, the “ form of rationality” as such. The more familiar name for such a necessary condition of autonomy is the Categorical Imperative. To make clear that this subjection to the “form” of rationality counts as autonomy, Kant also insists that this moral law be understood as “self-legislated,” that we must be able to regard ourselves as its “author,” and that we are bound to such a law because we bind ourselves to it

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.

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, a rejection of the reality of the Incarnation, and the expression of a decisively new form of thought. "The Nolan" did cross a real threshold that separates modernity from pre-modernity. The new, for Blumenberg is new, not belated, and what's more heretical still in our post-Nietzschean, post-Heideggerean world, better than the old. The "self-assertion" of modernity is, in a simple word, "legitimate."

THE IDEA OF A "PHILOSOPHICAL SCIENCE," something of a Fata Morgana in the West for several centuries, underwent a well-known revolutionary change when Kant argued that in all philosophical speculation about the nature of things, reason is really "occupied only with itself." Indeed, Kant argued convincingly that the possibility of any cognitive relation to objects presupposed an original and constitutive "relation to self." Thereafter, instead of an a priori science of substance, a science of "how the world must be", a putative philosophical science was directed to the topic of how any subject must "for itself" take or construe or judge the world to be. The nature and forms of such a self-conscious or even self-determining activity assumed center stage in later German philosophy, and, as many commentators have noted, was the decisive presupposition for Hegel's central, deeply obscure position on "the Absolute" as some sort of complete "self-consciousness."

When Alexander Nehamas’s pathbreaking, elegantly conceived and executed book, Nietzsche: Life as Literature,1 first appeared in 1985, the reception of Nietzsche in the Anglo-American philosophical community was still in its initial, hesitant stages, even after the relative success of Walter Kaufmann’s much earlier, 1950 book, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Anti-Christ,2 and its postwar “decontamination” of Nietzsche after his appropriation by the Nazis.3 Arthur Danto’s 1964 book, Nietzsche as Philosopher,4 was also an important if somewhat isolated event, and there finally began to appear in the seventies high-quality secondary literature, like John Wilcox’s 1974 book, Truth and Value in Nietzsche,5 and ..

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 defences of such authority in liberal societies (voluntarist, informed consent approaches), as well as traditional attacks on such strategies (ideology critique). Seeing such authority as institution bound and role based, it is argued, can help reframe, more broadly and more adequately, what is an “ethical problem” in medical practice and why