Robert Pippin and Film: Politics, Ethics, and Psychology after Modernism

Robert Pippin (1948- ) is a major figure in contemporary philosophy, having published influential work on thinkers including Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche. He is also an original thinker about - and critic of - film who has written books and numerous articles on canonical subjects such as the Western, Film Noir, and Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

In Robert Pippin and Film, Dominic Lash demonstrates the ways that film has been crucial to Pippin’s thought on important philosophical topics such as political psychology, ethics, and self-knowledge. He also explores the implications of Pippin’s methodological commitments to clear language and to maintaining close contact with the details of the films in question. In so doing, Lash brings Pippin’s work on film to a wider audience and contributes to current debates both within film studies and beyond. This includes those concerning the relationships between film and philosophy, criticism and aesthetics, and individual subjectivity and political consciousness.

Lash focuses on Pippin’s major works on film - Hollywood Westerns and American Myth (2010), Fatalism in American Film Noir (2012), The Philosophical Hitchcock (2017), and Filmed Thought (2020) as well as his many shorter writings on film.