“On Art As Philosophy and Philosophy As Art: A Conversation with Robert Pippin”

“Robert Pippin is one of the precious few thinkers, writers and teachers who stands out in the worlds of philosophy and the humanities for his devotion and attention to the arts most broadly construed.  While others in his field might want to write on Hegel alone (about whom Pippin writes better anybody - see his Hegel's Prac- tical Philosophy - for but one example) Pippin has been pro- lific in writing on some of the major arts and artists of our modern and contem- porary periods, including Hollywood Westerns, Proust, Henry James, Douglas Sirk , crime and Film Noir movies, Coatzee novels, and paintings from all periods and eras.  Even better it was revealed to me that he is deep in the footage of a book on the great Robert Bresson.  In short, he writes on a lot of things and on those things very well.  I must admit that my initial familiarity with him was back in the 1990s and due to my ongoing intense interest in Hegel, a philosophy who is experiencing a resurgence of interest at the moment, and even though I take Hegel to be for all ages and who though found to be difficult (an adjective that itself came up more than once in our episode) by many people I feel to be simply indispensable in the "canon" of the great philosophers.  I found Robert Pippin to be in general very open and helpful in clarifying what can often be miscon- strued as obscure in certain quarters.  Like the episodes with Elizabeth Anderson and George Kateb, this is one of those episodes where I was able to go into the weeds al little more than is usual and indulge my love for philosophy.  I can only hope that some of this love is infectious and is as interesting for the listener as it was for us to conduct the episode.” Links: Website: voices.uchicago.edu/rbp1 Books: https:// press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/author/P/R/ au5252783.html Bio  For Mr. Pippin's extended biography, visit us here:https://www.facebook.com/journeyofanaesthetepodca He is the author of several books on modern German philosophy, including Kant’s Theory of Form; Hegel’s Ideal- is: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness; Modernism as a Philosophical Problem; Hegel’s Practical Philosophy; After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philoso- phy of Pictorial Modernism, and Hegel’s Realm of Shadows: Logic as Metaphysics in The Science of Logic; a book on philosophy and literature, Henry James and Modern Moral Life; and five books on film. His last two books are Filmed Thought: Cinema as Re- flective Form, and Philosophy by Other Means: The Arts in Philosophy and Philosophy in the Arts, both published by University of Chicago Press. He is a past winner of the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award in the Humanities, is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, of the Ameri- can Philosophical Society, and of the German National Academy of Sciences, Leopoldina.