The Persistence of Subjectivity On the Kantian Aftermath [Paperback]

This book discusses approaches to the self-understanding and legitimation of the modern, 'bourgeois' life.The Persistence of Subjectivity examines several approaches to and critiques of the core notion in the self-undertanding and legitimation of the modern, bourgeois form of life: the free, reflective, self-determining subject. Since it is a relatively recent historical development that human beings think of themselves as individual centers of agency, and that one's entitlemen t to such a self-determining life is absolutely valuable, the issue at stake also involves the question of the historical location of philosophy.The Persistence of Subjectivity examines several approaches to and critiques of the core notion in the self-undertanding and legitimation of the modern, bourgeois form of life: the free, reflective, self-determining subject. Since it is a relatively recent historical development that human beings think of themselves as individual centers of agency, and that one's entitlemen t to such a self-determining life is absolutely valuable, the issue at stake also involves the question of the historical location of philosophy.The Persistence of Subjectivity examines several approaches to and critiques of the core notion in the self-understanding and legitimation of the modern, bourgeois form of life: the free, reflective, self-determining subject. Since it is a relatively recent historical development that human beings think of themselves as individual centers of agency, and that one's entitlement to such a self-determining life is absolutely valuable, the issue at stake also involves the question of the historical location of philosophy. What might it mean to take seriously Hegel's claim that philosophical reflection is always reflection on the historical actuality of its own age? Discussing Heidegger, Gadamer, Adorno, Leo Strauss, Manfred Frank, and John McDowell, Robert Pippin attempts to understand how subjectivity arises in contemporary institutiló'