Robert 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.

For his work on the modern German philosophical tradition, contemporary continental philosophy, moral theory, social and political philosophy, and theories of modernity he has twice been 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. Pippin’s many books and articles, including Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture (1991), Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations (1997), Henry James and Modern Moral Life (2000), Hegel on Ethics and Politics, (2004), and The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath (2005) have been described as representing “a turning point in American philosophy.”

Professor Pippin delivered the following address at the 2006 ASC conference.