"The relationship between philosophy and aesthetic criticism has occupied Robert Pippin throughout his illustrious career. Whether discussing film, literature, or modern and contemporary art, Pippin's claim is that we cannot understand aesthetic objects unless we reckon with the fact that some distinct philosophical issue is integral to their meaning. In his latest offering, Philosophy by Other Means, we are treated to a collection of essays that builds on this larger project, offering profound ruminations on philosophical issues in aesthetics along with revelatory readings of Henry James, Marcel Proust, and J. M. Coetzee"--

In his Berlin lectures on fine art, Hegel argued that art involves a unique form of aesthetic intelligibility—the expression of a distinct collective self-understanding that develops through historical time. Hegel’s approach to art has been influential in a number of different contexts, but in a twist of historical irony Hegel would die just before the most radical artistic revolution in history: modernism. In After the Beautiful, Robert B. Pippin, looking at modernist paintings by artists such as Édouard Manet and Paul Cézanne through Hegel’s lens, does what Hegel never had the chance to do. While Hegel could never engage modernist painting, he did have an understanding of modernity, and in it, art—he famously asserted—was “a thing of the past,” no longer an important vehicle of self-understanding and no longer an indispensable expression of human meaning. Pippin offers a sophisticated exploration of Hegel’s position and its implications. He also shows that had Hegel known how the social institutions of his day would ultimately fail to achieve his own version of genuine equality, a mutuality of recognition, he would have had to explore a different, new role for art in modernity. After laying this groundwork, Pippin goes on to illuminate the dimensions of Hegel’s aesthetic approach in the path-breaking works of Manet, the “grandfather of modernism,” drawing on art historians T. J. Clark and Michael Fried to do so. He concludes with a look at Cézanne, the “father of modernism,” this time as his works illuminate the relationship between Hegel and the philosopher who would challenge Hegel’s account of both modernity and art—Martin Heidegger. Elegantly inter-weaving philosophy and art history, After the Beautiful is a stunning reassessment of the modernist project. It gets at the core of the significance of modernism itself and what it means in general for art to have a history. Ultimately, it is a testament, via Hegel, to the distinctive philosophical achievements of modernist art in the unsettled, tumultuous era we have inherited.

"The authors argue against certain philosophical distinctions between art and science; between verbal and nonverbal meaning; and between the affective and the cognitive. The book continues Goodman's argument against one traditional mode of philosophizing which privileges the notions of 'truth' and 'knowledge'. Hence, the book is in a broadly pragmatic tradition. It also deals in detail with such topics as meaning in architecture and the concept of 'variation' in art, and contains a superb critique of some important views in contemporary epistemology. This work will be savored even by those who will not accept all aspects of Goodman and Elgin's approach. Essential for all undergraduate philosophy collections." --Stanley Bates, Choice

Rigorism and the new Kant -- Robert Brandom's Hegel -- John McDowell's Germans -- Slavoj Zizek's Hegel -- Axel Honneth's Hegelianism -- Alexander Nehamas's Nietzsche -- Bernard Williams on Nietzsche on the Greeks -- Heidegger on Nietzsche on nihilism -- Leo Strauss's Nietzsche -- The expressivist Nietzsche -- Alasdair Macintyre's modernity.

In this pathbreaking book one of America’s most distinguished philosophers brilliantly explores the status and authority of law and the nature of political allegiance through close readings of three classic Hollywood Westerns: Howard Hawks’ Red River and John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Searchers.Robert Pippin treats these films as sophisticated mythic accounts of a key moment in American history: its “second founding,” or the western expansion. His central question concerns how these films explore classical problems in political psychology, especially how the virtues of a commercial republic gained some hold on individuals at a time when the heroic and martial virtues were so important. Westerns, Pippin shows, raise central questions about the difference between private violence and revenge and the state’s claim to a legitimate monopoly on violence, and they show how these claims come to be experienced and accepted or rejected.Pippin’s account of the best Hollywood Westerns brings this genre into the center of the tradition of political thought, and his readings raise questions about political psychology and the political passions that have been neglected in contemporary political thought in favor of a limited concern with the question of legitimacy.

Provides comprehensive and up-to-date coverage of Nietzsche's philosophy, his key works and themes, his major influences and his legacy.

“This lively collection of essays on the ideas underpinning his films enriches and enlarges our understanding of Spielberg’s complex body of work.” —Joseph McBride, author of Steven Spielberg: A Biography Few directors have had as powerful an influence on the film industry and the movie-going public as Steven Spielberg. Whatever the subject—dinosaurs, war, extra-terrestrials, slavery, the Holocaust, or terrorism—one clear and consistent touchstone is present in all of Spielberg’s films: an interest in the human condition. In movies ranging from Jaws to Schindler’s List to Amistad to Jurassic Park, he has brought to life some of the most popular heroes—and most despised villains—of all time. In Steven Spielberg and Philosophy, Dean A. Kowalski and some of the nation’s most respected philosophers investigate Spielberg’s art to illuminate the nature of humanity. The book explores rich themes such as cinematic realism, fictional belief, terrorism, family ethics, consciousness, virtue and moral character, human rights, and religion in Spielberg’s work. Avid moviegoers and deep thinkers will discover plenty to enjoy in this collection.

This book argues that Henry James reveals in his fiction a sophisticated theory of moral understanding.

With the rise of review sites and social media, films today, as soon as they are shown, immediately become the topic of debates on their merits not only as entertainment, but also as serious forms of artistic expression. Philosopher Robert B. Pippin, however, wants us to consider a more radical proposition: film as thought, as a reflective form. Pippin explores this idea through a series of perceptive analyses of cinematic masterpieces, revealing how films can illuminate, in a concrete manner, core features and problems of shared human life. Filmed Thought examines questions of morality in Almodóvar’s Talk to Her, goodness and naïveté in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, love and fantasy in Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, politics and society in Polanski’s Chinatown and Malick’s The Thin Red Line, and self-understanding and understanding others in Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place and in the Dardennes brothers' oeuvre. In each reading, Pippin pays close attention to what makes these films exceptional as technical works of art (paying special attention to the role of cinematic irony) and as intellectual and philosophical achievements. Throughout, he shows how films offer a view of basic problems of human agency from the inside and allow viewers to think with and through them. Captivating and insightful, Filmed Thought shows us what it means to take cinema seriously not just as art, but as thought, and how this medium provides a singular form of reflection on what it is to be human.

A collection of quirky, entertaining, and reader-friendly short pieces on philosophical topics that range from a theory of jerks to the ethics of ethicists. Have you ever wondered about why some people are jerks? Asked whether your driverless car should kill you so that others may live? Found a robot adorable? Considered the ethics of professional ethicists? Reflected on the philosophy of hair? In this engaging, entertaining, and enlightening book, Eric Schwitzgebel turns a philosopher's eye on these and other burning questions. In a series of quirky and accessible short pieces that cover a mind-boggling variety of philosophical topics, Schwitzgebel offers incisive takes on matters both small (the consciousness of garden snails) and large (time, space, and causation). A common theme might be the ragged edge of the human intellect, where moral or philosophical reflection begins to turn against itself, lost among doubts and improbable conclusions. The history of philosophy is humbling when we see how badly wrong previous thinkers have been, despite their intellectual skills and confidence. (See, for example, “Kant on Killing Bastards, Masturbation, Organ Donation, Homosexuality, Tyrants, Wives, and Servants.”) Some of the texts resist thematic categorization—thoughts on the philosophical implications of dreidels, the diminishing offensiveness of the most profane profanity, and fatherly optimism—but are no less interesting. Schwitzgebel has selected these pieces from the more than one thousand that have appeared since 2006 in various publications and on his popular blog, The Splintered Mind, revising and updating them for this book. Philosophy has never been this much fun.