Books by "Robert B. Pippin"
5 books found
The great German idealist philosopher G. W. F. Hegel has exerted an immense influence on the development of philosophy from the early 19th century to the present. But the metaphysical aspects of his thought are still under-appreciated. In a series of essays Robert Stern traces the development of a distinctively Hegelian approach to metaphysics and certain central metaphysical issues. The book begins with an introduction that considers this theme as a whole, followed by a section of essays on Hegel himself. Stern then focuses on the way in which certain key metaphysical ideas in Hegel's system, such as his doctrine of the 'concrete universal' and his conception of truth, relate to the thinking of the British Idealists on the one hand, and the American Pragmatists on the other. The volume concludes by examining a critique of Hegel's metaphysical position from the perspective of the 'continental' tradition, and in particular Gilles Deleuze.
Ants, ghosts, cultures, thunderstorms, stock markets, robots, computers: this is just a partial list of the sentient things that have filled American literature over the last century. From modernism forward, writers have given life and voice to both the human and the nonhuman, and in the process addressed the motives, behaviors, and historical pressures that define lives—or things—both everyday and extraordinary. In Worldly Acts and Sentient Things Robert Chodat exposes a major shortcoming in recent accounts of twentieth-century discourse. What is often seen as the "death" of agency is better described as the displacement of agency onto new and varied entities. Writers as diverse as Gertrude Stein, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, and Don DeLillo are preoccupied with a cluster of related questions. Which entities are capable of believing something, saying something, desiring, hoping, hating, or doing? Which things, in turn, do we treat as worthy of our care, respect, and worship? Drawing on a philosophical tradition exemplified by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Wilfrid Sellars, Chodat shows that the death of the Cartesian ego need not entail the elimination of purposeful action altogether. Agents do not dissolve or die away in modern thought and literature; they proliferate—some in human forms, some not. Chodat distinguishes two ideas of agency in particular. One locates purposes in embodied beings, "persons," the other in disembodied entities, "presences." Worldly Acts and Sentient Things is a an engaging blend of philosophy and literary theory for anyone interested in modern and contemporary literature, narrative studies, psychology, ethics, and cognitive science.