Kant's Theory of Form: Essays on Critique of Pure Reason

by Robert B. Pippin

Genres: Philosophy

256 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1982

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. He is the author of several books and articles on German idealism and later German philosophy, including Kant's Theory of Form; Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness; Modernism as a Philosophical Problem; and Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations. In addition he has published on issues in political philosophy, theories of self-consciousness, the nature of conceptual change, and the problem of freedom. He also wrote a book about literature and philosophy: Henry James and Modern Moral Life. A collection of his essays in German, Die Verwirklichung der Freiheit, appeared in 2005, as did The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath, and his book on Nietzsche, Nietzsche, moraliste français: La conception nietzschéenne d'une psychologie philosophique, appeared in 2006. Fatalism in American Film Noir: Some Cinematic Philosophy appeared in 2012. He was twice an Alexander von Humboldt fellow, is a winner of the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award in the Humanities, and was recently a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a member of the American Philosophical Society. He is also a member of the German National Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Reviews

[Pavel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is resourceful for a number of reasons. One reason is that it affords, to my mind, a clear exposition of a central problem attendant on Kant’s Kategorientheorie – that is, the problem of accounting for the way in which the generality of concepts has purchase on the particulars they conceive. This problem is the fault line between Kant and Hegel. Accordingly, the clarity Pippin affords in exposing this problem can contribute not only towards our understanding of Kant, but also towards our understanding of Hegel’s critique of Kant, and, in consequence, towards our understanding of Hegel.