The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath - Softcover

Pippin, Robert B.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0521613043 ISBN 13: 9780521613040

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2005

Synopsis

The Persistence of Subjectivity examines several approaches to and critiques of the core notion in the self-understanding and legitimation of the modern, "bourgeois" form of life: the free, reflective, self-determining subject. Since it is a relatively recent historical development that human beings think of themselves as individual centers of agency, and that one's entitlement to such a self-determining life is absolutely valuable, the issue at stake also involves the question of the historical location of philosophy. What might it mean to take seriously Hegel's claim that philosophical reflection is always reflection on the historical "actuality" of its own age? Discussing Heidegger, Gadamer, Adorno, Leo Strauss, Manfred Frank, and John McDowell, Robert Pippin attempts to understand how subjectivity arises in contemporary institutional practices such as medicine, as well as in other contexts such as modernism in the visual arts and in the novels of Marcel Proust.

About this title

About the Author:

Robert B. Pippin is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago.

Review:

'... Pippin is one of the most original and imaginative philosophers now at work. ... I can think of no other philosopher writing today who is so consistently illuminating on such a wide range of topics. We can learn a lot from Pippin.' Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0521613043
• ISBN 13: 9780521613040
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 380