Online research in philosophy

This paper describes the practice of rabbinic Torah-Study in Pragmatist epistemological terms. Pragmatists describe the quest for knowledge as a process in which we interpret our experiences and thereby construct an idea of our reality. This description creates or generates a tension between the constructive aspect of the knowledge quest and the idea of an independent reality. The paper argues that Pragmatism shares this tension, as well as the hermeneutical and pragmatic method for overcoming it, with the rabbinic concept of (...) "Torah Study." This association is illustrated through a close reading of a Midrash on the first verse of the Biblical "Woman of Valor" song. (shrink)

Following the landmark corporate scandals of the early 21st century, there appeared to be a tremendous increase in the U.S. business media’s emphasis on issues of ethics in corporate leadership. The purpose of this research was to examine whether that apparent increase was reflected in an actual change in that media’s portrayals of successful leaders. We content analyzed the text of a total of 180 articles in Business Week, Fortune, and Forbes magazine, 90 from the five years preceding the landmark (...) scandals and 90 from the five years following the scandals. We found no evidence that the landmark scandals had any impact on the media’s incorporation of ethics in their portrayals of leaders. We attribute this substantially to the persistence of a worldview in the U.S. business press that emphasizes leader traits and actions that have a direct impact on corporate profits. Additionally, we found some interesting consistencies and differences in media portrayals across the two time periods, likely related to the rise and fall of dot-com businesses. We discuss the implications of these findings for researchers and corporate leaders. (shrink)

Organizations constitute morally-complex environments, requiring organization members to possess levels of moral courage sufficient to promote their ethical action, while refraining from unethical actions when faced with temptations or pressures. Using a sample drawn from a military context, we explored the antecedents and consequences of moral courage. Results from this four-month field study demonstrated that authentic leadership was positively related to followers’ displays of moral courage. Further, followers’ moral courage fully mediated the effects of authentic leadership on followers’ ethical and (...) pro-social behaviors. Theoretical and practical implications for further integrating the work on moral courage, authentic leadership and ethics are discussed. (shrink)

We agree that treating rules and similarity as dichotomous opposites is unproductive. However, describing all categorization operations as a continuum of varied similarity process obscures a multidimensional contrast. We describe two processes, instantiated rules and abstract analogy, both of which have aspects of rules and similarity, and question whether they can be compared informatively as points on a continuum.

My concern in this paper is how to reconcile a central tension in Hannah Arendt’s thinking, one that – if left unresolved – may make us reluctant to endorse her political theory. Arendt was profoundly and painfully aware of the horrors of political evil; in fact, she is almost unparalleled in 20 th century thought in her concern for the consequences of mass political violence, the victims of political atrocities, and the most vulnerable in political society – the stateless, (...) the pariahs, the outcasts. At least, this is the case in her discussions of concrete, historical political situations. Yet in her philosophical writings, she continues to argue that the political realm ultimately redeems human existence, and furthermore, that politics should remain distinct and autonomous from moral evaluation. Political action must be evaluated according to “greatness,” not goodness or any other explicitly moral or even ethical standard. She goes so far as to suggest that politics and morality may be deeply hostile to one another, and can only be reconciled in situations of extreme emergency. This can leave many feeling both perplexed and deeply uncomfortable with the theory of human action that Arendt proposes. Drawing on her notions of political conscience, judgment and - in particular - her account of forgiveness, in this paper I argue that Arendt offers an ethics of plurality, in which what is good is developed from what is most politically important: amor mundi, or love of our shared political world. (shrink)

Os usos do passado e da tradição em uma sociedade pós-tradicional, na perspectiva de Zygmunt Bauman, é resultado dos desdobramentos da modernidade em sua produção da ambivalência. O objetivo do presente artigo é rastrear esse pensamento na obra de Bauman a partir da suturação do conceito de tradição com a obra mais ampla do filósofo. Buscaremos, então, pontos de contato com outros autores que também trabalharam esta temática – notadamente, Hannah Arendt – a partir da ótica de que a (...) modernidade é marcada pela dependência de um passado ressignificado. (shrink)

Cette étude, dans un premier temps, apporte des preuves à la possibilité d’interpréter la pensée politique de Hannah Arendt comme un projet phénoménologique original dont le but est d’élever l’apparence de la personne au rang de mode unique de l’apparaître. Puis elle présente brièvement la phénoménologie matérielle de Michel Henry dans laquelle le Soi individuel joue un rôle tout aussi central, puisqu’il est la condition de l’apparence de la vie et le fondement de tout apparaître. En conclusion, l’étude esquisse (...) les conséquences d’une telle position privilégiée du sujet individuel pour la conception théorique de la réalité effective de l’apparaître, de même que pour les problèmes pratiques de l’action de l’homme dans le monde. (shrink)

Although Hannah Arendt is considered one of the major contributors to social and political thought in the twentieth century, this is the first general anthology ...

Discusses different aspects of responsibility in Hannah Arendt's works.

Discusses the different senses of morality in Hannah Arendt's work, and her understanding of conscience.

This paper argues that Hannah Arendt's political theory offers key insights into the power that binds together the feminist movement - the power of solidarity. Second-wave feminist notions of solidarity were grounded in notions of shared identity; in recent years, as such conceptions of shared identity have come under attack for being exclusionary and repressive, feminists have been urged to give up the idea of solidarity altogether. However, the choice between (repressive) identity and (fragmented) non-identity is a false opposition, (...) and the Arendtian account of solidarity developed here allows us to move beyond this opposition. Thus, Arendt provides us with a model of solidarity that can stand a post-identity politics feminist theory in good stead. Key Words: Hannah Arendt • feminist theory • identity politics • power • solidarity. (shrink)

In contrast to political realism's equation of the `political' with domination, Hannah Arendt understood the `political' as a relation of friendship utterly opposed to the use of violence. This article offers a critique of that understanding. It becomes clear that Arendt's challenge to realism, as exemplified by Max Weber, succeeds on account of a dubious redefinition of the `political' that is the reverse image of the one-sided vision of politics she had hoped to contest. Questioning this paradoxical turn leads (...) to a critique of Arendt's separation of violence and power and, consequently, her attempt to insulate a politics of friendship from one of hostility and coercion. However, political realism is not thereby affirmed. What is required, instead, is a view of the `political' that accepts the interwoven-ness of violence and power but also emphasizes the normative ideals of moderation and care. Key Words: Hannah Arendt • enmity • friendship • moderation • the `political' • power • realism • violence • Max Weber. (shrink)

For Hannah Arendt, spontaneous, ‘initiatory’ human action and interaction are suppressed by the normalizing pressures of society once ‘life’ - that is, sheer life - becomes the primary concern of politics, as it does, she finds, in the modern age. Arendt’s concept of the social is indebted to Martin Heidegger’s analysis of everyday Dasein in Being and Time , and contemporary political philosophers inspired by Heidegger, such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Giorgio Agamben, tend to reproduce her account (...) of the withdrawal of the political in modernity. In this article, I complicate Arendt’s theory by turning to Michel Foucault’s parallel but diverging understanding of the nature of power in modern society to show, surprisingly, that Foucault’s narrative of the emergence of modern power pictures a society that is more, not less, politicized. Key Words: Hannah Arendt • bio-power • Michel Foucault • Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe • modernity • Jean-Luc Nancy • pastoral power • the social • rulership. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: 1. Introduction Seyla Benhabib; Part I. Freedom, Equality, and Responsibility: 2. Arendt on the foundations of equality Jeremy Waldron; 3. Arendt's Augustine Roy T. Tsao; 4. The rule of the people: Arendt, archê, and democracy Patchen Markell; 5. Genealogies of catastrophe: Arendt on the logic and legacy of imperialism Karuna Mantena; 6. On race and culture: Hannah Arendt and her contemporaries Richard H. King; Part II. Sovereignty, the Nation-State and the Rule of Law: 7. Banishing (...) the sovereign? Internal and external sovereignty in Arendt Andrew Arato and Jean Cohen; 8. The decline of order: Hannah Arendt and the paradoxes of the nation-state Christian Volk; 9. The Eichmann trial and the legacy of jurisdiction Leora Bilsky; 10. International law and human plurality in the shadow of totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt and Raphael Lemkin Seyla Benhabib; Part III. Politics in Dark Times: 11. In search of a miracle: Hannah Arendt and the atomic bomb Jonathan Schell; 12. Hannah Arendt between Europe and America: optimism in dark times Benjamin R. Barber; 13. Keeping the republic: reading Arendt's On Revolution after the fall of the Berlin Wall Dick Howard; Part IV. Judging Evil: 14. Are Arendt's reflections on evil still relevant? Richard Bernstein; 15. Banality reconsidered Susan Neiman; 16. The elusiveness of Arendtian judgment Bryan Garsten; 17. Existential values in Arendt's treatment of evil and morality George Kateb. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt and The Phenomenology of Human Rights examines contemporary debates on the foundations of human rights through the lens of Arendt's writings, showing how Arendt’s phenomenological standpoint, unique within these debates, is able to shed new light a number of problems within human rights theory.

Though there exists a vast literature dealing with Hannah Arendt's thoughts on evil in general and Adolf Eichmann in particular, few attempts have been made to assess Arendt's position on evil by tracing its connection with her reflections on conscience. This essay examines the nature and significance of such a connection. Beginning with her doctoral dissertation on St Augustine and ending with her posthumously published studies in The Life of the Mind, Arendt's oeuvre exhibits strong thematic continuity: the triad (...) thinking-conscience-evil forms its most enduring core. A puzzling core, to be sure, considering the controversies triggered, especially regarding her notion of the 'banality of evil'. By placing the role of conscience at the very center of Arendt's lifelong reflections, this essay explores the - in many ways related - influence exerted by St Augustine and Heidegger. Heidegger's conception of conscience in Sein und Zeit is identified as a crucial source for understanding - so the claim holds - why Arendt found Heidegger's philosophy particularly wanting as regards the question of evil. Key Words: Arendt • Augustine • conscience • evil • Heidegger • Socrates • thinking. (shrink)

While the recent publication of the Hannah Arendt-Martin Heidegger correspondence confirms that there existed a close personal tie between these two thinkers, the relation between their philosophies is far more problematic. This article argues that Arendt's originality presents itself in its full light in her two major theoretical works of the 1950s, Between Past and Future and The Human Condition , when these works are considered to present a thinly veiled, implicit critique of Heidegger's philosophy. Arendt's critique becomes especially (...) visible in the 'existential' role that she attributed to natality in its relation to political action and to remembrance, placing in question the central orientation of Heidegger's existential ontology in terms of being-toward-death. (shrink)

This paper offers a restatement of the basic project of Hannah Arendt's Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, tries to trace its theoretical motivation, and presents some criticisms of Arendt's interpretation of Kant's Critique of Judgment. Arendt's political philosophy as a whole is an attempt to ground the idea of human dignity on the publicly displayed 'words and deeds' that con stitute the realm of human affairs. This project involves a philo sophical response both to Plato's impugning of the dignity (...) of the polis and to Hegel's founding of modern historicism. The Kant Lectures bring this philosophical project to its completion because the enact ment of public deeds presupposes a company of judging spectators who draw meaning from the spectacle by judging and appreciating what is enacted. But this conception, precisely because it relates so deeply to Arendt's own theoretical impulse, leads to a sometimes onesided and misleading reading of Kant. Key Words: aesthetic judgment • dialogue/communication • Hannah Arendt • Immanuel Kant • political judgment. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt is recognized as one of the most important political theorists of the 20th century. This paper, however, suggests that she is as much a thinker as a theorist. Against the professionalized discourse of political theory that offers theories of democracy, citizenship, and liberalism, Arendt insists that political thinking is of more importance that political theory. The force of Arendt's political insight is that we court danger when we take thinking for granted. Against the worship of reason and (...) rationalized calculation that dominates political discourse, Arendt holds up an idea of thinking that sets up obstacles to hasty and thoughtless action. The paper develops Arendt's particular articulation of what it calls Arendt's activity of thinking. (shrink)

Abstract Hannah Arendt frequently referred to herself as a phenomenologist in that she wished to reveal how action, in the Greek sense of praxis, engenders a public space of appearances or of phenomenality. The life of the Greek city?state, of the polis, was made possible through this activity, this bios politikos. However, beginning with Plato and continuing right down to Hegel and Heidegger, there has been a sustained attempt to cover up and conceal the specific phenomenality of the bios (...) politikos in favour of the bios theoretikos, involving the substitution of poiesis and theoria for the life of praxis. At the roots of this concealment of the active life is a misunderstanding of the true nature of the theoretical and its highest form, namely, thinking. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt’s (1906-1975) conception of power is entirely distinctive. It is rooted in a political philosophy that celebrates the public realm of freedom that emerges when people act with others as citizens or political equals. For Arendt, power is actualized where people act together to sustain or to change the world they share with one another. Her fundamental claim is this: ‘Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power is never the (...) property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together’. This entry offers some background to Arendt’s account, highlights two important contrasts that she makes between power and violence, and then points to her related notion of authority. (shrink)

Many of Hannah Arendt's readers argue that differences between her earlier and later work on judgment are significant enough to constitute an actual break or rupture. Of Arendt's completed works, the 'Postscriptum' to Thinking , the first volume of The Life of the Mind , and her Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy are widely considered to be her definitive remarks on judgment. These texts are privileged for two primary reasons. First, they were written after Arendt's controversial text, Eichmann in (...) Jerusalem . It was Arendt's recognition of the role that Eichmann's inability to think played in his war crimes which motivated her to analyse more fully not only the 'mental activity' of thinking, but those of willing, and judging as well. Second, in The Life of the Mind and the Kant Lectures , Arendt treats judgment as a distinct mental activity; in her earlier work judgment is connected to both politics and thought. In this essay I argue that while Arendt does indeed reformulate her notion of judgment, she does not depoliticize it. I begin by calling into question Ronald Beiner's claim that Arendt's later work on judgment can stand in for the unwritten third volume of The Life of the Mind . I then consider two more specific claims, the first of which is that judgment is relevant only in 'rare' times of 'crisis'. I argue that a crisis as Arendt understands it is not necessarily and merely a 'rare' and short-lived phenomenon. The effects of what Arendt refers to as 'dark times' are long-term and pervasive and, moreover, the function of making judgments within such an expanded context is politically germane. Second, I problematize the idea that conceiving of judgment as a distinct mental faculty necessarily disconnects it from politics. I examine the nature of Arendt's relationship to Kant and argue that she appropriates and reconceptualizes his work in such a way that judgment, while a distinct faculty, nonetheless retains its political relevance. I conclude by suggesting that the impulse to systematize Arendt's unsystematic treatment of judgment ought to be resisted. (shrink)

There is much disagreement among many commentators of Hannah Arendt's work about whether her contributions to politics and philosophy contain a clandestine version of decisionism or, by contrast, represent an explicit attempt to break away from the elements of voluntarism, arbitrariness, and irrationality, which are considered to be inherent to any theory of the decision. Despite the many disagreements that set apart these two interpretations of Arendt, however, there is a common presupposition that both share. They are in agreement (...) concerning the decision: it is a threat and a vice, intrinsically dangerous and potentially totalitarian in nature, which ought to be expelled from any theory of politics with a normative content. As a result, the terms of the debate pertain solely to whether Arendt was a (crypto-) decisionist and not to the nature and evaluation of the decision as such. This paper argues, contrary to Arendt's critics, that although elements of a theory of the decision can be found scattered throughout many of her writings, she was nonetheless unswerving in her opposition to decisionism. But unlike her defenders, it also argues that had Arendt built on these elements to elaborate a systematic theory of the decision, she would have avoided many of the flaws and inconsistencies that plague her concept of politics. (shrink)

This is a critical and exegetical introduction to the work and thought of Hannah Arendt, one of the most powerful and important political thinkers of the twentieth century. The book traces the connections in Arendt's work between public life and political thinking and the ways in which each informs the other. In conclusion, the author suggests why Arendt provides a unique way of rendering the political visible and relevant to people in an everyday setting.

Recognition of Hannah Arendt's contribution to the history of western philosophy is long overdue. Arendt was a 'political thinker', but this book highlights the importance of her ontological preoccupations for an understanding of her work.

The political philosopher Hannah Arendt develops several arguments regarding why truthfulness cannot be counted among the political virtues. This article shows that similar arguments apply to lying in business. Based on Hannah Arendt's theory, we distinguish five reasons why lying is a structural temptation to businessmen: business is about action to change the world and therefore businessmen need the capacity to deny current reality; commerce requires successful image-making and liars have the advantage to come up with plausible stories; (...) business communication is more often about opinions than about facts, giving leeway to ignore uncomfortable signals; business increasingly makes use of plans and models, but these techniques foster inflexibility in acknowledging the real facts; and businessmen easily fall prey to self-deception, because one needs to act as if the vision already materializes. The theory is illustrated by a case study of Landis, which grew from a relatively insignificant organization into a large one within a short period of time, but ended with outright lies and bankruptcy. (shrink)

The question of judgment has become one of the central problems in recent social, political and ethical thought. This paper explores Hannah Arendt's decisive contribution to this debate by attempting to reconstruct analytically two distinctive perspectives on judgment from the corpus of her writings. By exploring her relation to Aristotelian and Kantian sources, and by uncovering debts and parallels to key thinkers such as Benjamin and Heidegger, it is argued that Arendt's work pinpoints the key antinomy within political judgment (...) itself, that between the viewpoints of the political actor and the political spectator. The paper concludes by highlighting some lacunae and difficulties in the development of Arendt's account, difficulties that set challenges for those theorists (such as Seyla Benhabib and Alessandro Ferrara) who wish to appropriate and extend Arendt's contribution into the field of contemporary critical theory. Key Words: action • aesthetics • community • freedom • history • judgment • reflection. (shrink)

: This essay explores the value of oppositional, performative political action in the context of oppression, domination, and exclusionary political spheres. Rather than adopting Iris Marion Young's approach, Drexler turns to Hannah Arendt's theories of political action in order to emphasize the capacity of political action as action to intervene in and disrupt the constricting, politically devitalizing, necrophilic normalizations of proceduralism and routine, and thus to reorient the importance of contestatory action as enabling and enacting creativity, spontaneity, and resistance.

: Freedom, understood as active participation in public life, connects the thinking of Rosa Luxemburg with that of Hannah Arendt. Biographically separated through the rise and victory of the totalitarian movements, they both developed a concept of the political that is oriented toward freedom and that demonstrates—in spite of their different historical experiences—essential common features: both authors emphasize the recognition of difference as a presupposition for a critical discussion of norms, traditions, and authorities, for the capacity to make unconstrained (...) judgments, and for the ability to take personal responsibility. (shrink)

In place of traditional approaches in environmental ethics, I suggest an improved approach, with respect to the goal of improving the condition of the natural environment, called 'world mediation' through the use of Hannah Arendt's theory of the vita activa . This approach focuses on the relationship between human made worlds and nature, from which a theory of value is suggested. Intrinsic value theory and nature-culture monism are both criticized for an insufficient attention paid toward the human-nature relationship.

: Hannah Arendt's and Charlotte Delbo's writings about the Holocaust trouble our preconceptions about those who do evil and those who suffer evil. Their jarring terms "banal evil" and "useless knowledge" point to limitations and temptations facing scholars of evil. While Arendt helps us to resist the temptation to mythologize evil, Delbo helps us to resist the temptation to domesticate suffering.

'Thinking with Hannah Arendt: An Introduction' suggests that those who read Arendt not as a system-building professional philosopher but, rather, as a thinker whose work invites and (by 'unfreezing' concepts) prepares us to think for ourselves about particular realities of our times will read her as she wished to be read. The essays following this introduction are briefly discussed as examples of such independent engagement and, in that, as truer to Arendt's work than readings by those who approach her (...) from their pre-set theoretical and/or critical stances. (shrink)

Renewing Our Common World: Essays On Hannah Arendt And Education is the first book to bring together a collection of essays on Hannah Arendt and education. The contributors contend that Arendt offers a unique perspective, one which enhances the liberal and critical traditions' call for transforming education so that it can foster the values of democratic citizenship and social justice. They focuses on a wide array of Arendtian concepts— such as natality, action, freedom, public space, authority and judgment— (...) which are particularly relevant for education in a democratic society. Teachers, educators, and citizens in general who are interested in democratic or civic education would benefit from reading this book. (shrink)

The paper explores the possibility of collectives forgiving and being forgiven. The first half of the paper articulates and amends Hannah Arendt’s account of forgiveness of and by individuals. The second half raises several objections to the possibility of extending this account to forgiveness of and by collectives. In reply, I argue that collectives can have emotions, be guilty, and meet other necessary conditions for forgiving or being forgiven. However, I explain why, even though collective forgiveness is possible, it (...) may, nonetheless, prove dissatisfying. (shrink)

In this contribution I discuss Hannah Arendt's philosophy of culture in three rounds. First I give an account of my view on Hannah Arendt's main work The Human Condition. In this frame of reference I distance myself from the importance attached to Hannah Arendt as a political philosopher and hold a warm plea for her as a philosopher of culture (I and II). Second I pay attention to her view on science and technology in their cultural meaning, (...) expressed in the last chapter of The Human Condition. This part consists in a summary of her thoughts as I read them (III, IV, and V). After these two rounds I make some critical remarks on Hannah Arendt's interpretation of science and technology. The viewpoint of ?eccentricity? will be discussed as a frame of reference for her philosophy of culture (VI). (shrink)

A study of Hannah Arendt's indictment of social science, approaches to totalitarianism (Bolshevism and National Socialism), and of the robust responses of her ...

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) is likely to be the first woman to join the canon of the great philosophers. Arendt's work has attracted a huge volume of scholarship. This collection reprints papers from the USA, Germany, France and the UK, where further scholarly work is emerging at an increasing pace. Given that there was vigorous debate of her work in her lifetime, that there have since been several waves of evaluation and re-evaluation, and because a new generation of scholars is (...) now coming to her work, a systematic collection of the critical assessments of her thought is extremely timely. (shrink)

Tracing the historical and theoretical distinctions between labor and work from the early Greeks to the present, Hannah Arendt presents a compelling analysis of the nature of our technological crisis. Western culture has been formed through a dominant understanding of human existence and instrumental thinking that have inevitably led to a crisis in the way we understand ourselves and relate to the world. Owing much to her contemporary, Martin Heidegger, Arendt sees the roots of the environmental crisis to be (...) embedded in our inheritance of thinking and building. (shrink)

This paper argues that those critics of Hannah Arendt's thought who have protested at her disavowal of ‘moral standards’ as being appropriate in the judgment of political action have, in fact, misjudged the structure of her thought. My argument is, however, a constructive one: the paper seeks to demonstrate how Arendt arrives at her sweeping rejection of conventional standards of moral judgment, and what solution she proposes. I do this in three stages. First, I address Arendt's understanding of self (...) as opposed to world: especially how the moral absolutes which may be claimed by the former may threaten the very structure of the latter. Second, I draw upon her model of action to discover the idea of a worldly ethics, one of principle. And third, I consider the fate of our goals when we act into the world, paying particular attention to the idea of responsibility and the on-going responsiveness to the world that belongs to action under a principle. (shrink)

O objetivo deste artigo é a análise das críticas de Hannah Arendt à concepção dos direitos humanos, introduzida pelo pensamento dos filósofos contratualistas e efetivada, politicamente, pelas revoluções americanas e francesas no final do século XVIII. Contudo, este objetivo não seria plenamente alcançado sem a avaliação da proposta de Arendt para a superação de suas próprias críticas: a reconstrução dos direitos humanos através do reconhecimento que cada indivíduo tem direito a ter direitos, independente das fronteiras do Estado-nação. Arendt vai (...) buscar na moral universalista e cosmopolita kantiana o conceito de humanidade e dá a ele as dimensões ontológicas e políticas necessárias para se construir um espaço público internacional, onde o direito a ter direito seja decorrente do mero pertencimento à humanidade, não se dissolvendo nos limites de cada Estado-nação. The purpose of this article is the analysis of the criticisms of Hannah Arendt's conception of human rights, introduced by the thought of the contractual philosophers and made effective, politically, by American and French revolutions in the late eighteenth century. However, this aim would not be fully achieved without the review of Arendt's proposal to overcome her own criticisms: the reconstruction of human rights by recognizing that every individual has the right to have rights, regardless of borders of the Nation-State. Arendt tries to discover in the universal and cosmopolitan moral of Kant the concept of humanity and gives him the ontological and political dimensions needed to build an international public space where the right to have rights is due to the mere belonging to the humanity, not dissolving itself in the limits of each Nation-State. (shrink)

Assaulting Hannah Arendt: the banality of criticism -- Hannah and Heidegger: once more into the tangled web of emotions and politics -- Hannah Arendt: juridical critic of totalitarianism -- Totalitarian visions of the good society -- The revolutionary experience in France and America -- Making political philosophy -- Open societies and free minds -- Hannah's choice: social science or political philosophy -- Beyond totalitarianism: Hannah Arendt as radical conservative.

Normal 0 21 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 O presente artigo tem por objetivo abordar o tema dos direitos humanos e cidadania sob a perspectiva da filosofia política de Hannah Arendt. O artigo retrata, em sua primeira parte, a ilusáo fundacionista dos direitos humanos ante a situaçáo dos apátridas e refugiados, situaçáo que leva a autora a formular o conceito de cidadania como o direito a ter direitos . Na sequência, analisa os elementos que configuram sua teoria política, tais como: (...) liberdade, açáo, pluralidade e espaço público, os quais, articulados entre si, permitem a formaçáo de um conceito de cidadania baseado na real participaçáo dos cidadáos na organizaçáo política de uma comunidade, em contrapartida a um conceito meramente formal de cidadania. Para, finalmente, abordar o sistema de conselho, instância em que a cidadania é compreendida como açáo vivenciada no espaço público, favorecendo, assim, a possibilidade de efetivaçáo dos direitos humanos, exercidos como dignidade política dos cidadáos. (shrink)

The article examines the writings of one of the most influential political philosophers, Hannah Arendt, and specifically focuses on her views regarding the distinction between the private and the public and the transformation of the public to the social by modernity. Arendt’s theory of human activity and critique of modernity are explored to critically evaluate the social contributions and implications of reproductive technologies especially where the use of such technologies is most dominant within Western societies. Focusing on empirical studies (...) on new reproductive technologies in Israel, it is argued, powerfully demonstrates Arendt’s theory, and broadens the perspectives through which society should evaluate these new technologies towards a more reflective understanding of its current laws and policies and their affect on women more generally. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt was one of the foremost political thinkers of the twentieth century, and her particular interests have made her one of the most frequently cited thinkers of our time. This Companion examines the primary themes of her multi-faceted work, from her theory of totalitarianism and her controversial idea of the 'banality of evil' to her classic studies of political action and her final reflections on judgment and the life of the mind. Each essay examines the political, philosophical, and (...) historical concerns which shaped Arendt's thought, and which prompted her to become one of the most unapologetic champions of the political life in the history of Western thought. (shrink)

(2013). ‘A Sense of the World’: Hannah Arendt’s Hermeneutic Phenomenology of Common Sense. International Journal of Philosophical Studies. ???aop.label???. doi: 10.1080/09672559.2012.743156.

La noción de sentido común en la obra de Hannah Arendt juega un papel fundamental a la hora de explicar cómo un hombre del tipo de Adolf Eichmann podía mantener una auténtica incapacidad para pensar. No obstante, la manera como esta autora comprende aquella noción no es plenamente clara: el sentido común se halla aparentemente en un punto medio entre la actividad del pensamiento y el conocimiento científico, pues aun cuando el sentido de realidad proporcionado por el sentido común (...) resulta fundamental para ambos, éstos, dada la manera como se oponen entre sí, no se reducen a este mero sentido de realidad. Según creo, la tensión que genera este fenómeno puede ser evaluada con más claridad si se estudia la expresión ‘sentido común’ a partir de dos significados distintos –aunque complementarios– de acuerdo con su carácter pasivo y activo: el sentido común puede ser comprendido desde un punto de vista ‘sensible’ y un punto de vista ‘semántico’, respectivamente. (shrink)

Normal 0 21 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Tabela normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} En este trabajo se analiza la concepción del totalitarismo de Hannah Arendt a partir de la novedosa perspectiva aportada por Jean-Luc Marion con su teoría del fenómeno saturado. Para esto se comienza profundizando en las características específicas de este tipo de fenómenos y las consecuencias que acarrea, buscando (...) reconocer luego en las descripciones de Arendt la pertinencia de tal análisis y su riqueza, articulando este pasaje con la ayuda de las valiosas puntualizaciones de Juan Carlos Scannone en torno a la interrelación fecunda entre fenomenología y hermenéutica. (shrink)

Although the modern age is often described as the age of democratic revolutions, the subject of popular foundings has not captured the imagination of contemporary political thought. Most of the time, democratic theory and political science treat as the object of their inquiry normal politics, institutionalized power, and consolidated democracies. The aim of Andreas Kalyvas' study is to show why it is important for democratic theory to rethink the question of its beginnings. Is there a founding unique to democracies? Can (...) a democracy be democratically established? What are the implications of expanding democratic politics in light of the question of whether and how to address democracy's beginnings? Kalyvas addresses these questions and scrutinizes the possibility of democratic beginnings in terms of the category of the extraordinary, as he reconstructs it from the writings of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt and their views on the creation of new political, symbolic, and constitutional orders. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to make apparent Hannah Arendt’s thought on the practical dimension of universality alluded throughout her works. The issue of universality has been one of the most pivotal questions in political philosophy until today. Beneath of her philosophical endeavor there is always her deep concern for it. In this article I will show the practical dimension of universality unintentionally pursued by Arendt and its political implications. By harshly criticizing Plato Arendt successfully shows how violent (...) the truth claim in the political realm can be. What Arendt is critical of is the attitude to dictate philosophical ideals in politicalrealm, the attitude I named the “Philosopher King Complex.” Arendt’s bitter criticism of this attitude makes believe that she is critical of any claim of universality in the political realm, but her praise of Socrates clearly shows that she does not altogether blame the claim itself. We also need to note the debate with Gershom Scholem. Scholem’s charge that Arendt dealt with the Eichmann case from a humanitarian, universalistic viewpoint while neglecting the Jewish perspective could be serious considering Arendt’s emphasis on the pariah’s perspective. Arendt’s standpoint, however, includes both a particularistic view as a Jew and auniversalistic view as a human at the same time. This is possible because Arendt correctly understood the role of speech. Arendt’s use of Pastor Grueber’s example in Eichmann in Jerusalem implies that she believes in the power of speech to relate our consciousness to reality and to make communication possible. To retain human plurality along with universality, it is necessary but not sufficient to focus on speech alone. In this regard we learn a lesson from the Habermas-Henrich debate: that self-relation of consciousness plays the role of establishing self-identity. A successful example of combining these two insights is Arendt’s position since she delivered her hermeneutic insights in the language of philosophy of consciousness. Albrecht Wellmer’s unjustifiable charge of Arendt’s concept of judgment to be “mystic” is an example of misunderstanding of her peculiar position. If we admit this, we can say that Arendt establishes aposition to give an answer to the question “is democracy a universal truth?”: democracy, as far as it is a political truth, is neither equivalent to a universal truth as a mathematical one, nor just a particular cultural opinion of westerners. This interpretation of Arendt puts her position near to liberal-communitarian views of Michael Sandel or Charles Taylor. Sandel criticizes Arendt to be universalistic, but in fact his position is quite near to hers. For example, his method of analogy is almost the same as her concept of exemplary validity. Rather, it seems to me that Arendt provides more solid theoretical ground than Taylor or Sandel does. For Arendt’s position stands on a firm understanding of the power of speech and on an insight of self-relation of consciousness. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt's approach to politics focuses on action and conduct, rather than institutions, constitutions, and states. In light of Arendtian conceptions of politics, essays in this book challenge conventional IR theories. The contributions on agency explore concepts and categories of political action that enable individuals to act politically and to re-make the world in new, unpredictable ways. The contributions on structure explore how Arendt provides new critical purchase upon often reified structures and categories.

This is a comparative study on the 20th's century's Western philosophy Hannah Arendt(1906-1975) and the 16th century's Eastern Confucian thinker Wang Yang-ming(1472-1529). Wang-ming was a Neoconfucian thinker of the 16th century China. In his time, Chinese intellectual world was dominated by Neoconfucian Ch’eng-Chu School which laid much stress on scholastic work of learning. Yang-ming saw a huge obstacle of intellectualism in Ch’eng-Chu school’s theoretical scholasticism that emphasized overly book-learning to be required on the way to become a genuine person. (...) He recognized this kind of rigidintellectualism as the true reason for the dichotomy in his time between knowledge and action, between learning and life, and between selfcultivation and social practice. According to his view, the dichotomy brought about serious political corruption and oppressed human creativity up to the point of total institutionalization of “truth”. Hannah Arendtwas sickened under the severe totalitarianism of the 20th century, especially as a Jew under the German Nazism. She undertook an extensive analysis of how Western civilization generated totalitarian imperialism, fascism, and communism, going through the modern times, all of which made human beings’ language and action superfluous, erupted, and destroyed. Through these experiences, she became disgusted with traditional Western hierarchy of thinking and doing, philosophy and politics, theory and practice, in short, vita contemplativa and vita activa. Although they both lived far away from each other in space and time and used completely different languages, they both, in my view, shared many common problems and concerns, not only in the contents of their thoughts but also in the way and form of construction of thoughts. To the similar extent that people were warned and judged by both thinkers respectively in their times of the totalitarianism of making human beings superfluous and puppet-like, we human beings in the 21st century are considered to be threatened by the totalitarian nullification caused by modern utilitarianism, automation, consumerism, etc. These principles are practiced limitlessly and boundlessly, so that our whole lives of politics, culture, and education are now suffering from that threat. It is my conviction that we can acquire some guide and wisdom from the twothinkers of East and West, because they discovered possible solutions of how to restore and revive human beings’ capacities of thinking and judging, and how to bring action and doing. (shrink)

The article is dedicated to the politico-theological critique of Judaism from the position of Christianity. It shows the affinity of Marx’s early critique of liberal state and of Hannah Arendt’s criticism of formal legalistic thinking in the contemporary judicial treatment of Nazism (and of similar international political crimes). Marx’s critique of nation-state finds its unlikely continuation in Arendt’s critique of international law. The politico-theological argument is explicit in Marx and implicit in Arendt, but both develop the Hegelian criticism of (...) liberal state which shows its reliance on the abstract law, on the one hand, and on the egotistic abstract individual, on the other. The theological undercurrent of the argument is both sign of its limitations, and of the subsisting relevance of the politico-theological framework, even in the similarly novel circumstances of the twentieth century. It is only within and through the theological critique and critique of theology that these issues would stand a chance of resolution. (shrink)

(2012). Possibly preventing catastrophes: Hannah Arendt on democracy, education and judging. Ethics and Education: Vol. 7, Creating spaces, pp. 237-249. doi: 10.1080/17449642.2013.766540.

This is the first book length study of war in the thought of one of the twentieth-century's most important and original political thinkers. Hannah Arendt's writing was fundamentally rooted in her understanding of war and its political significance. But this element of her work has surprisingly been neglected in international and political theory. This book fills an important gap by assessing the full range of Arendt's historical and conceptual writing on war and introduces to international theory the distinct language (...) she used to talk about war and the political world. It builds on her re-thinking of old concepts such as power, violence, greatness, world, imperialism, evil, hypocrisy and humanity and introduces some that are new to international thought like plurality, action, agonism, natality and political immortality. The issues that Arendt dealt with throughout her life and work continue to shape the political world and her approach to political thinking remains a source of inspiration for those in search of guidance not in what to think but how to think about politics and war. Re-reading Arendt's writing, forged through firsthand experience of occupation and struggles for liberation, political founding and resistance in time of war, reveals a more serious engagement with war than her earlier readers have recognised. Arendt's political theory makes more sense when it is understood in the context of her thinking about war and we can think about the history and theory of warfare, and international politics, in new ways by thinking with Arendt. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt is recognized as one of the most creative and original thinkers of the twentieth century. This study provides an original reconstruction of Arendt's political philosophy, and is the first to systematically evaluate the four major concepts underlying her work--modernity, action, judgment, and citizenship. Taking each concept in turn, The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt examines the integrity of Arendt's argument, providing a philosophical account of her theory of participatory democracy based on freedom, plurality, and solidarity. Beginning (...) from the interpretation of these concepts in her work, d'Entreves assesses Arendt's importance to contemporary debates on the nature and scope of democratic citizenship, and explores the conditions necessary for an active and democratic political culture to flourish. D'Entreves draws out the tensions and ambiguities in Ardendt's work, arguing that Arendt's conception of active citizenship and communication provides the best starting point for the exercise of political agency. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt escreveu que o “mal banal” origina-se da incapacidade do indivíduo para pensar. Porém, pode-se perguntar se o mal não pode se originar da falta de julgamento. Oou seja, o indivíduo comete atos maus porque não averigua os dados, não os avalia. Eem tal hipótese, o “mal banal” ocorre devido à ausência do “juízo reflexionante” (ou reflexivo) e da “mentalidade alargada” kantianos, resolvendo muitas das lacunas que o mal derivado do pensamento possui, como a que exige distinguir o (...) raciocínio do pensamento. (shrink)

Heidegger's 1950 claim to Jaspers (later repeated in his Spiegel interview), that his Nietzsche lectures represented a "resistance" to Nazism is premised on the understanding that he and Jaspers have of the place of science in the Western world. Thus Heidegger can emphasize Nietzsche's epistemology, parsing Nietzsche's will to power, contra Nazi readings, as the metaphysical culmination of the domination of the West by scientism and technologism. It is in this sense that Heidegger argues that German Nazism is "in essence" (...) the same as Soviet Bolshevism and American capitalism. Jaspers himself had likewise emphasized the Will to Power by contrast with the doctrine of eternal recurrence. Heidegger differs from Jaspers (as from their mutual student Hannah Arendt) inasmuch as Jaspers preserves an enthusiasm for the possibility of scientific certainty while yet recognizing (as Heidegger does) a strong sense of the limits of science. None of the three can correctly be labeled anti-scientific. The essay closes by recalling Arendt's reflections on the very possibility of resistance using the example of Jaspers' own resistance to contemporary political events.

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Depoliticization: The Political Imaginary of Global Capitalism follows in the path blazed by Hannah Arendt and Cornelius Castoriadis, where politics is seen as a mode of freedom; the possibility for individuals to consciously and explicitly create the institutions of their own societies. Starting with such problem as: What is capital? How can we characterize the dominant economic system? What are the conditions for its existence, and how can we create alternatives?, the articles examine the central institutions of modern Western (...) societies, market capitalism, representative liberal democracy, and science. To elucidate the problem of depoliticization, the authors engage a number of thinkers from Karl Marx, Max Weber, Thorstein Veblen to Cornelius Castoriadis, Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière, and Stanley Kubrick. -/- . (shrink)

Two central strands in Arendt's thought are the reflection on the evil of Auschwitz and the rethinking in terms of politics of Heidegger's critique of metaphysics. Given Heidegger's taciturnity regarding Auschwitz and Arendt's own taciturnity regarding the philosophical implications of Heidegger's political engagement in 1933, to set out how these strands interrelate is to examine the coherence of Arendt's thought and its potential for a critique of Heidegger. By refusing to countenance a theological conception of the evil of Auschwitz, Arendt (...) consolidates the break with theology that Heidegger attempts through his analysis of the essential finitude of Dasein. In the light of Arendt's account of evil, it is possible to see the theological vestiges in Heidegger's ontology. Heidegger's resumption of the question concerning the categorical interconnections of the ways of Being entails an abandonment of finitude: he accommodates and tacitly justifies that which can have no human justification. (shrink)