Culmination

Robert B. Pippin is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of many books on philosophy, literature, art, and film.

• AcknowledgmentsSiglaPrefaceSection One: Preliminaries1. The Issues2. What Is the Problem of the Meaning of Being?Section Two: Heidegger’s Kant3. Being as Positing4. Kant as Metaphysician5. Finitude in Kant’s Moral Theory6. The ThingSection Three: Heidegger’s Hegel7. Hegel, Idealism, and Finitude8. Hegel: The CulminationSection Four: Post-Culmination9. Poetic Thinking?Bibliography

"In his rich new book, The Culmination, Robert Pippin paints an engrossing and, in my view, convincing picture of Heidegger’s reading of German Idealism—mainly Kant and Hegel, and a bit of Schelling, who is sometimes said to be a precursor to Heidegger (Fichte is mentioned only occasionally)—as the “culmination” of a “rationalist” or “logicist” understanding of metaphysics that started with Plato and Aristotle. In Heidegger’s view, in this understanding of metaphysics the question of Being, central to Heidegger’s own thought, is addressed solely or chiefly in terms of the question of logical or conceptual intelligibility, not in its own right."