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U. of C. luminary lands $1.5 million Mellon award
November 7, 2001 BY DEBRA PICKETT STAFF REPORTER
Robert Pippin is very smart. So smart, in fact, he's getting paid to think. And he just got a raise. Pippin, a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago, won a $1.5 million award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The prize, which gets paid out over the next three years, will provide Pippin with his regular university salary and benefits. So instead of the usual work--mostly teaching and administration--he does to earn that money, he'll be free to, well, sit around and think. And he gets to use the remaining amount--a pretty substantial sum--however he thinks will best support research and intellectual conversation at the university. So conceivably, he could blow it all on serving really good coffee at faculty meetings. But he probably won't. "Actually," the professor said, "I don't even know if I can come up with enough ideas to spend the money." Pippin, who joined the Chicago faculty in 1992, won the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award because the five or six--he can't quite remember--books he's authored have, in the words of the Foundation, offered a "profound reinterpretation of the conceptual bases of modern thought." In his books, Pippin writes about the questions facing Europe in the 18th century. Life in Europe had remained pretty much the same for a thousand years. Then, in a relatively short period of time, from the late 16th to the beginning of the 18th century, things changed in a big way. Natural science replaced mysticism. Capitalism replaced feudalism. Democratic governments replaced monarchies. The world became modern. And in the midst of all this change, the importance of religion--which had been the central organizer of people's lives--began to decline. So how could people make decisions? How could they know what was right and wrong when everything was changing? What were the rules? Who would make them? "There were people," Pippin explained, "who were incredibly anxious about all this and others who were great celebraters of it." Pippin studied both groups. And as he did, he saw that their concerns and hopes were remarkably similar to our own. "We're still living in that era and we are still far from even understanding it," he said. So Pippin's job--the one he'll spend the next three years working on--is to help us all figure this out. To do this, he plans to write as many as three more books and to offer support to other scholars doing similar work. "The big thing I'm supposed to do," he explained, "is to give people a way to think about values, about what we can and can't do, ethically and how we decide that." His first decision, of course, will be how to spend the money.
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