Why the World Matters: Hannah Arendt's Philosophy of New Beginnings

Revista de ciencia política (Santiago), 2006

Argirò, A. Report on the Conference The Politics of Beginnings: Hannah Arendt Today (Anna Argirò). HAnet 2024, 13, 198-201., 2024

Bloomsbury History: Theory and Method, 2022

Holocaust, namely, her books The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). And as Arendt considered lived experience the guidepost and starting point of all thinking (including philosophical thinking), even her seemingly most abstract writings are always historically informed and situated, albeit not always immediately recognizable as such for the reader. Methodologically, it is Arendt's background in hermeneutic phenomenology-and its inherent narrative approach-that explains her take on the philosophy of history and on historiography. She once described her philosophical practice as "old-fashioned storytelling" (Arendt 1962: 10) and, indeed, this is how she saw the position of the historian. Influences Arendt was an independent thinker, whose work does not easily fit within any existing school of either philosophical or political thought. Main figures in the philosophical canon and in the history of political theory are among her interlocutors, most notably Plato (and Socrates), Saint Augustine, Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, and Martin Heidegger, as well as republican thinkers and actors from Aristotle to Machiavelli, Montesquieu and the American Founding Fathers. She familiarized herself with the work of most of these thinkers as a graduate and doctoral student in theology and philosophy in Germany in the 1920s and she would return to their work time and again, mostly in a critical fashion. If phenomenology is considered in a broad, not strictly Husserlian, sense, Arendt's work can be seen as phenomenological in an original, consistent, and exemplary way (Loidolt 2018; Vasterling 2011). Though Arendt attended lectures delivered by the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, the existential phenomenology (Existenzphilosophie) of Karl Jaspers, and the hermeneutic phenomenology of Martin Heidegger had more and a lasting impact on her thought. While increasingly being recognized as belonging to the phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions in philosophy, Arendt also transformed it by applying it to a new subject matter: political phenomena and events. The two key notions in Arendt's phenomenology of action-plurality and natality-will be introduced below, as they deeply inform her view on history as the domain of the new (see "Impact," below). Also, key elements of her hermeneutic, interpretative approach to events, including genealogy, deconstruction, and storytelling are discussed because of its direct bearing on her views on historiography (see "Impact," below). Although Arendt is best known as a thinker of action and the active, political, life, she has always also engaged with the "life of the mind," entailing the mental activities of thinking, willing, and judging. This section will finish with an outline of Arendt's appropriation of Kant's theory of aesthetic ("reflective") judgment to articulate a notion of political judgment suitable for historiography after "the rupture in tradition" that totalitarianism brought about.

The Heythrop Journal, 2013

This collection of papers comes from a series of conferences in the US and, while some of the papers are very interesting, they are not as well focused as the title might suggest. Only one has much to do with Jesus and that is about archaeology in Jerusalem (it concerns the location of Jesus' trial at the Praetorium). The book has two parts, the first called 'Identity in Jewish and Christian Communities of Faith'. This has seven chapters: three on Qumran and the others on the economy of first-century Galilee,

2010

2010

The Review of Politics, 1981

Hannah Arendt's last work, The Life of the Mind, was published in 1978 in two volumes entitled, Thinking and Willing.* She planned to write a third volume, "Judging," and in fact had just begun writing it the day she died. Instead of the final book, "Judging," Willing, the second volume of The Life of the Mind, contains excerpts from her lectures on Kant's political philosophy and theory of judgment given at the New School for Social Research in 1970. From these excerpts we can get some idea of Arendt's theory of judgment, although we will never know her final thoughts on this subject since she intended to revise and expand the lectures for the "Judging" volume. Even without the book on judgment, The Life of the Mind remains an altogether fascinating and demanding work, a fitting capstone to a remarkable career. Part of the challenge of this work is due to Arendt's curious and elusive style with which readers of her previous books are already familiar. As in her earlier works, so in The Life of the Mind, she combines complex philosophical argumentation with speculative flights of thought, digressions on all manner of subjects, close textual analysis, and aphoristic declarations, all capped by favorite quotes from writers, poets, and philosophers ranging from Homer to Auden, and from Heraclitus and Plato to Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Sartre. Given the profusion of subject matter and her unique manner of treatment, it is sometimes difficult to follow the main thread of her argument. Yet the book's difficulty should not discourage anyone from reading it. Persevering readers will be richly rewarded. Although The Life of the Mind is a dense work and difficult to read, Arendt very much wanted to be understood not only by scholars, but by the average, nonspecialized reader as well.

Education and Thinking in Continental Philosophy: Thinking against the Current in Adorno, Arendt, Deleuze, Derrida and Rancière, 2020

In this chapter, I analyze Arendt's conception of thinking and examine ways education can facilitate thinking activities. I argue that education for thinking in Arendt's approach is indeed possible and of great importance, but may also be hazardous to the thinker as well as her political community. Confronting this danger does not require less thinking (or education encouraging it), but rather engaging in two different but complementary kinds of thinking. That is to say, taking up the educational potential of Arendt's conception of thinking requires acknowledging the difference between two distinct kinds of thinking she discusses – a distinction which often escapes existing scholarship – and using the second as an antidote to the dangers of the first. The first kind of thinking is a mental activity demanding withdrawal from the world and from the company of other people in order to think about meanings, while the second follows Kant's notion of "enlarged mentality", attempting to view the world from the points of view of these very others.

Classical Philology

, her working diary for the years 1950 to 1973, and the numerous early essays whichwithout settling the debates that continue to rage around her most controversial book, Eichmann in Jerusalemare facilitating a more nuanced understanding of her relationship to both her Jewish heritage and the twentieth-century project of the state of Israel. 3 Since the 1990s feminists have turned afresh to Arendt's writings, moving beyond condemnation of her apparent indifference to 'The Woman Question' to interrogate her thought's potential to contest and destabilise sedimented social and political hierarchies that entrench gender-based oppression. 4 Her work is increasingly debated in ecopolitics and environmental philosophy as a source of insights into the relation between humanity and the world (both natural and manmade) and the dependence of the fate of each upon that of the other. 5 What has this new generation of interlocutors made of the manifold turns of antiquity in Arendt's writings? From her 1920s doctoral dissertation on 'The Concept of Love in St Augustine', to the reflections on ancient republics contained in On Violence (1970), there can be no doubt of the importance to Arendt of what she explicitly theorised as a tradition of political thought that derives from Greece and Rome. Above all the classical Greek polis forms a central, positive example within The Human Condition (1958), the book generally