Citing his "profound reinterpretation of the conceptual bases of modern thought," the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation selected the University of Chicago’s Robert Pippin as one of five recipients of an unusual new fellowship, the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award. Pippin is the Raymond W. and Martha Hilpert Gruner Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy and the College and Chair of the Committee on Social Thought. The award is special both in its amount ($1.5 million to be distributed over three years–bigger than both the Nobel and the MacArthur) and its focus: unlike many such prizes, the award is earmarked entirely for research.

A professor at the University of Chicago since 1992, Pippin’s work has focused on trying to understand the modern condition by re-examining German philosophy in books such as Kant’s Theory of Form, Hegel’s Idealism, and Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations. His colleague on the Committee for Social Thought, Jonathan Lear, says that Pippin is "the foremost philosopher thinking about the meaning of modernity. He has also, almost single-handedly, revived and defended the tradition of German Idealism, especially the philosophy of Hegel. Pippin has shown, I think conclusively, that the concepts and methods of German Idealism are an invaluable resource as we try to comprehend the world we live in." Pippin says that he focuses on the Idealists because of their attempts "to understand European modernization. These attempts reflect an anxiety about the nature of the modern tradition and the attempt to create a secular foundation for modern ethical life." More recently he has explored the moral dimension of Henry James’s fiction. In awarding the prize, the Mellon Foundation described Pippin’s Henry James and Modern Moral Life as "a model of productive engagement between philosophy and literary studies" that also exemplifies "the intellectual breadth of the University of Chicago’s famed Committee on Social Thought."

Pippin has three current projects he intends to use the prize money to work on. The first is a study of Hegel’s theory of freedom. For Hegel, "freedom was not just a question of free will but the freedom of persons in relation to other persons: freedom is a form of social life." The second is entitled The Erotic Nietzsche: Philosophers Without Philosophy. It will detail how Nietzsche’s misgivings about modern secular democratic society relate to the nature of human desire, particularly philosophical desire. Nietzsche, explains Pippin, "doesn’t believe in philosophy but in the philosophic life." The final book is entitled Modern Aesthetics After the Beautiful, which will focus on the shift from the criterion of the beautiful to those of the sublime and the conceptual in late-19th and early-20th century art.

The Prize, intended by the Mellon Foundation as a statement about the importance of research and dialogue in the humanities, will allow Pippin to create opportunities for others as well as himself. The prize pays for Pippin’s university salary and benefits for three years, two of which must be spent in residence. The remainder of the sum, a very substantial amount, is to be used to support research and intellectual conversation at the University. Pippin is considering plans to support graduate student research, postdoctoral fellowships, visiting professorships, and perhaps reinvigorating a recent program in the Committee where working writers would visit to teach classes on literature.