Pippin's The Culmination, ‘logic as metaphysics’, and the unintelligibility of Dasein

Abstract

Robert Pippin's new book, The Culmination, examines Heidegger's reading and critique of Kant and Hegel. Since Pippin is perhaps best known as one of the most influential contemporary advocates for the importance of engaging with the difficult work of Hegel in particular, it will no doubt surprise quite a few of his readers that, on some fundamental points, the book concludes that “Heidegger is right” (p. xi). In the present piece, I explore some intriguing issues that Pippin's book raises. Although the disagreement between his principal parties is obviously central to his discussion, my main focus is on a possible point of important agreement that that discussion also opens up, in light of which Heidegger might be fruitfully interpreted as pursuing a variant of a Kantian/Hegelian project, though this will also lead me to make a number of critical points about Pippin's reading of Heidegger: although there are grounds for thinking that Pippin's Heidegger does subscribe to such a project, some of the considerations that Pippin advances in arguing that “Heidegger is right” sit uncomfortably—it seems to me—with that project.