Professor Dr Robert Pippin

Research Priorities: 19th and 20th century European philosophy, political philosophy, philosophy and film
Robert B. Pippin is an American philosopher and a leading expert on German Idealism. He is particularly known for his work on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Immanuel Kant. He has also conducted research on Friedrich Nietzsche, Marcel Proust, Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Henry James, and the philosophy of film. He is interested in the history of philosophy, epistemology, and ethics. He also investigates theories of modernism.
Robert B. Pippin’s book “Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness”, published in 1989, was an important contribution to contemporary Hegel research and presented a new way of looking at Hegel’s work. He also examined Hegel’s theory of art and its significance for modern visual art.
In his book “The Actuality of German Idealism”, Robert Pippin argues that the conceptual innovations developed by the key figures in the German philosophical tradition – Kant and Hegel, in particular – are still of major philosophical relevance and should by no means be regarded as of purely historical interest. In Pippin’s view, various traditional interpretations of concepts such as self-consciousness, freedom, subjectivity, logic, spirit, and philosophical methods fail to sufficiently consider both their radical nature and philosophical potential.
Robert Pippin also has various interdisciplinary interests. These include the relationship between philosophy and literature, which he examines with respect to the work of the American-British author Henry James and the French author Marcel Proust. He also has a major interest in modern art and, in particular, contemporary film. For example, he examined the topic of fatalism in American film noir and the philosophical significance of the Western directors Howard Hawks and John Ford.
More recently, Pippin has looked at the medium of cinema from a philosophical perspective. For example, he examined Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller “Vertigo” in the book “The Philosophical Hitchcock: Vertigo and the Anxieties of Unknowingness”, published in 2017. In Pippin’s view, the director depicts a fundamental problem in contemporary society: people constantly try to obtain the knowledge needed for love, trust, and relationships. However, this often leads to self-deception and profound misunderstandings. In his book “Filmed Thought – Cinema as Reflective Form”, published in 2020, Robert Pippin shows in detail how internationally renowned films depict core problems of human co-existence. For example, he looks at questions of morality in Pedro Almodóvar’s “Talk to Her”, at politics and society in Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown”, and at goodness and naivety in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Shadow of a Doubt”.