By Sara Patterson

Prof. Robert B. Pippin’s wide-ranging scholarship encompasses studies of 19th-century philosophers like Hegel and Kant to 20th-century filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford. For his contributions to the political, moral, and aesthetic self-image of society, Pippin will receive the Luhmann Science Prize from the Sparkasse Bielefeld Foundation on Dec. 9 in the Bielefeld Wissenswerkstadt, Germany. Previous winners include Ronald Dworkin, Quentin Skinner, Lorraine Daston and Pierre Rossanvallon. The Prize includes more than prestige; prize winners receive €25,000.

“Pippin is an outstanding American interpreter of the philosophy of German Idealism,” said Prof. Angelika Epple, Rector of Bielefeld University and chair for the jury of the Luhmann Science Prize. “The jury was also particularly impressed by the unique connection between philosophy and culture/aesthetics, especially the way he deals with the medium of film from a philosophical perspective. He works out how fundamental problems of human coexistence are portrayed and described in literature, art, and the medium of cinema.”

His academic career started as an English major at Trinity College. During his college years, Pippin participated in the intellectual protests of the late 1960s, read philosophers such as Marx, Aristotle, and Kant, and wanted to figure things out through philosophical ideas about modern culture. He became impressed with the questions asked in philosophy and turned toward that field for his doctorate at Penn State.

“Kant and Hegel were working in the shadow of the French Revolution, which is one of the divisive historical markers of the modern age,” said Pippin, the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee of Social Thought, Department of Philosophy, and the College at UChicago. “They were profoundly influenced by the drama of the execution of the King and his family and other French aristocrats and the change in thinking about the rights of man, which led to their concern about secular societies. I find what they wrote about normative structures and reasonings still applies today.”

He has channeled his fascination with Kant and Hegel into multiple books, including Kant’s Theory of Form: An Essay on the ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ (1982), Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfaction of Self-Consciousness (1989), and Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life (2008). More recently, Pippin has also focused on how literature and films show individuals things about themselves in ways that philosophy and sociology cannot. His six books on film and three books on literature include Hollywood Westerns and American Myth: The Importance of Howard Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosophy (2008), Fatalism in American Film Noir: Some Cinematic Philosophy (2012), and The Philosophical Hitchcock: “Vertigo” and the Anxieties of Unknowingness (2017).

“During the course of his career, Robert Pippin has produced a genuine oeuvre,” said David E. Wellbery, the LeRoy T. and Margaret Deffenbaugh Carlson University Professor in the Department of Germanic Studies, Committee on Social Thought, and the College at UChicago. “In addition to transforming Hegel studies as pursued internationally and publishing essays on virtually every major German philosopher from Kant to Gadamer, he has written books (seven!) of philosophical film criticism as well as penetrating studies of Henry James and John Coetzee and a highly original study of modernism in painting. There is no body of work by an American philosopher in this or the previous century that exhibits such range and depth.”

For Pippin, Hollywood western films show the relevance of myth to Americans. The winning of the west equates to the mythic origin story like Homer’s epics did for the Greeks. Classic westerns such as “The Searchers,” “Red River,” and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” look at how to establish legal order in the frontier, how two groups vie for and then one exerts dominance, and how to achieve the transition from lawlessness to lawfulness.

“Robert Pippin’s work defies easy summary,” said Joel Isaac, associate professor in the Committee on Social Thought, Department of History, and the College and interim chair for the Committee on Social Thought at UChicago. “He has written with great distinction on Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger; on the films of Hitchcock and Sirk; on James and Proust; on modern art and its discontents; and on much, much more. His topic is nothing less than the nature and prospects of modernity itself, considered from a philosophical point of view.”

Additionally, Pippin studies film noir movies philosophically. Originally, film noirs were the B-list movies, paired in double features with A-list movies. They made money for the studios, cost less to make, and often used brilliant European ex-pat directors such as Fritz Lang, Jacques Tourneur, and Robert Siodmak. The films were also good because the studio bosses rarely interfered with the directors as they did for A-list movies.

“Film noir movies of the 1940s and 1950s were often intelligent, subtle movies that showed human life as it is lived and gave examples of lives gone wrong,” Pippin said.

Among his many awards, grants, and accomplishments, 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, the American Philosophical Society, and the German National Academy of Sciences called Leopoldina. Fluent in German, Pippin has received two Alexander von Humboldt fellowships for year-long research stints respectively in Cologne, Germany, and Tubingen, Germany, was a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin for one year, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a recipient of a Siemens Foundation fellowship for a year-long residence in Munich. For 26 years, he was the chair of the Committee on Social Thought for UChicago.

“Robert Pippin transformed the way philosophy is done in the English-speaking world,” said Jonathan Lear, the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor on the Committee of Social Thought, Department of Philosophy, and the College at UChicago. “A generation ago, anglophone philosophers thought it fine to ignore Hegel; for them, it was gobbledygook. Pippin's groundbreaking work changed that.  But it is not simply that he revived a particular thinker or tradition; he forced us to think of the centrality of history and time for even the most ‘timeless’ categories of philosophy.”

For 32 years, UChicago has been his academic home. Pippin has found the undergraduates and graduate students’ intellectual energy unusual. For example, he has 70 students enrolled in his class on Hegel, which at many universities would have 10 or 15 students. Pippin appreciates the faculty autonomy, leadership’s trust in the faculty, and overall scholarly atmosphere here.

“UChicago deserves its reputation as an intellectual place,” he said.