Kant & Post-Kantian Philosophy Group Talk and Workshop (Robert Pippin, Chicago)

The Kant & Post-Kantian Philosophy Group is delighted to welcome Robert Pippin as its guest speaker. Dr. Pippin is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books and articles on German idealism and later German philosophy, including Kant’s Theory of Form; Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness; Modernism as a Philosophical Problem; and Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations. He was twice an Alexander von Humboldt fellow, is a winner of the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award in the Humanities, and was recently a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a member of the American Philosophical Society. He is also a member of the German National Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Talk Title

Hegel after Heidegger

Talk Abstract

Martin Heidegger claimed that German Idealism, especially the thought of Hegel, had brought to light a deficiency in the entire rationalist tradition of philosophy, which, when exposed as clearly as Hegel had, meant that the tradition could no longer credibly continue. He went on to argue that the implications of this deficiency had spread far beyond academic philosophy, were manifest in the daily life of the modern West, contributing to a historical world dominated by the technological predation of nature, conformism, thoughtlessness and a degraded cultural life. The tradition, he said, had “culminated” in the thought of Hegel; that is, the deficiency and its implications had finally become clearest in his system. The question raised in this lecture is whether Heidegger meant to charge that Hegel had simply neglected a question (“the meaning of being”) which he should have raised, or whether that neglect renders suspect the many other issues Hegel raises.

In addition to this lecture, Dr. Pippin will host an all-day workshop on September 27. The topic of the workshop will be his recent book The Culmination: Heidegger, German Idealism, and the Fate of Philosophy, and it will feature comments by Nick Stang, Tarek Dika, and Dave Suarez, with replies by Robert Pippin.

Those interested in participating in the workshop on September 27 should email Nick Stang ahead of the event.

The Kant & Post-Kantian Philosophy Group is a a subgroup of the History of Philosophy Research Group, which focuses on European philosophy in Kant and post-Kantian traditions.