Pippin earned his BA in English from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. and his Ph.D. in philosophy from Penn State under the direction of Stanley Rosen. Before moving to Chicago, he taught for a number of years in the department of philosophy at UCSD, where he counted Henry Allison and Herbert Marcuse among his colleagues. In 2009 he held the Spinoza Chair of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam.[2] That same year, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.[3] Since 2014 he is PhD honoris causa at Uppsala University, Sweden.[4] He currently resides in Chicago with his wife Joan.
His 1989 book Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness was a major contribution to Hegel studies. In it Pippin portrays Hegel as a thinker with fewer metaphysical commitments than are traditionally attributed to him. Hegel's claims about the "Absolute" and "Spirit" are interpreted in a more epistemological vein. A central thesis of Hegel's, according to Pippin, is that epistemology is metaphysic because to be is to be determinately intelligible. Much of Hegel's project, in Pippin's reading, is a continuation rather than a reversal of the Kantian critique of dogmatic metaphysics. Hegel is not doing ontological logic, but is doing logic as metaphysics, which is a continuation of transcendental logic. Logic as metaphysics is the science of pure thought, or the thought of thought.
According to Pippin's non-metaphysical interpretation of Hegel, the Hegelian "Geist" (which is usually translated as "Spirit") is not a divine spiritual being, and accordingly Hegel's idealism is not a defense of monistic pantheism. According to Pippin, the Hegelian "Geist" should be understood as the totality of norms according to which we can justify our beliefs and actions. The important point is that we cannot justify anything except in such a normative logical space of reasons. So no kind of distinctively human rational cognition and action is articulatable or intelligible independently of such norms. In a phenomenological-hermeneutical jargon, these norms constitute a horizon, a perspective in which we can make anything intelligible to ourselves. Additionally, these norms are socio-historically articulated. Geist is the dynamic process of these norms and their transformations in human history. Hegel calls different articulations of these norms "shapes (Gestalten) of spirit". It should be added that any shape of spirit could collapse under the pressure of internal or external forces (such as internal inconsistencies in those norms or being faced with new forms of life with different norms) which lead to a crisis for the authority of those norms. But because of the actual plurality of shapes of spirit (or forms of life) any account of human agency which is socio-historical is in danger of getting into relativism. So Hegelian idealism is not a kind of return to pre-Kantian and pre-critical dogmatic metaphysics, but is trying to go beyond the Kantian critical project on the one hand, and historicist critiques of Kantian transcendental philosophy on the other.
These ideas could be attributed to many other philosophers, such as Herder, Heidegger, Gadamer, and MacIntyre. But according to the non-metaphysical interpretations of Hegel (such as Pippin's, Pinkard's and Redding's) there is a distinctive feature of the Hegelian approach - mutual recognition as the condition of free, self-determined and so authentic rational agency - which can transcend the alleged dangers of socio-historical relativism or, on the other hand, returning to dogmatic metaphysics or trans-historical subjectivity.
Such a revisionist reading of Hegel has gained a following, inspiring important works by Terry Pinkard, Paul Redding, Diego Bubbio and others, as well as influencing less historically oriented philosophers of mind such as John McDowell and Robert Brandom. A similar movement to interpret Hegel as a "category-theorist" has been inspired in Germany by Klaus Hartmann.
In Pippin's 1991 Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture, he develops what he calls a socio-cultural corollary to his 1989 work. He enters the debate on the legitimacy of the modernist project and the possibility of post-modernity. Still claiming to be interpreting Hegel, Pippin tries to defend modern, prosaic bourgeois society. Nonetheless, he admits that, and attempts to explore why, the dominant high culture of that society has been one of what might be termed self-hatred: he ranges from Flaubert and later modernist avant-gardes to the intellectual trends of New Historicism and Derrideandeconstructive thought. Generally speaking, Pippin's argument is that modernity is "never-ending", that it is an attempt to bring greater rational transparency to all of our social practices and that much of the self-hatred of modern high culture is motivated by attempts to bring such transparency to areas where it had previously not existed. This process may never be completed but once it is begun, it cannot be stopped.
Books
Kant's Theory of Form: An Essay on the 'Critique of Pure Reason' (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).
Marcuse: Critical Theory and The Promise of Utopia, eds. R. Pippin, A. Feenberg, C. Webel. MacMillan (Great Britain), Bergin and Garvey (USA), 1988.
Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991).
Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Henry James and Modern Moral Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Hegel on Ethics and Politics, eds. Robert Pippin and Otfried Höffe, Translated by Nicholas Walker, Introduction by Robert Pippin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Die Verwirklichung der Freiheit, foreword by Axel Honneth and Hans Joas (Frankfurt a.M.: Campus Verlag, 2005).
The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Nietzsche, moraliste français: La conception nietzschéenne d'une psychologie philosophique (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2005).
