Philosophy by Other Means: The Arts in Philosophy and Philosophy in the Arts by Robert B. Pippin (review)

Abstract

Comprised mostly of previously published essays, Robert Pippin’s Philosophy by Other Means reads less as a monograph than a snapshot of his entire oeuvre. For those unfamiliar, that oeuvre is dense and diverse, made up of over 20 books that range from influential studies of German philosophers such as Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche (Pippin has published half a dozen books on Hegel alone) to philosophical examinations of literature and film (including studies of Henry James and J. M. Coetzee, as well as of Alfred Hitchcock, Douglas Sirk, film noir, and US westerns). In this regard, Pippin may very well be the closest thing contemporary US philosophy has to a Stanley Cavell. Not only does he traverse the analytic-continental divide with similar aplomb (the fact that he is a card-carrying Hegelian in the almost definitionally anti-Hegelian field of analytic philosophy in and of itself testifies to the deftness of this traversal), but he likewise treats the aesthetic, especially literature and film, as a form of “philosophy by other means.”