For much of its history, philosophy was not merely a theoretical discipline but a way of life, an "art of living." This practical aspect of philosophy has been much less dominant in modernity than it was in ancient Greece and Rome, when philosophers of all stripes kept returning to Socrates as a model for living. The idea of philosophy as an art of living has survived in the works of such major modern authors as Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault. Each of (...) these writers has used philosophical discussion as a means of establishing what a person is and how a worthwhile life is to be lived. In this wide-ranging, brilliantly written account, Alexander Nehamas provides an incisive reevaluation of Socrates' place in the Western philosophical tradition and shows the importance of Socrates for Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault. Why does each of these philosophers—each fundamentally concerned with his own originality—return to Socrates as a model? The answer lies in the irony that characterizes the Socrates we know from the Platonic dialogues. Socratic irony creates a mask that prevents a view of what lies behind. How Socrates led the life he did, what enabled or inspired him, is never made evident. No tenets are proposed. Socrates remains a silent and ambiguous character, forcing readers to come to their own conclusions about the art of life. This, Nehamas shows, is what allowed Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault to return to Socrates as a model without thereby compelling them to imitate him. This highly readable, erudite study argues for the importance of the tradition within Western philosophy that is best described as "the art of living" and casts Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault as the three major modern representatives of this tradition. Full of original ideas and challenging associations, this work will offer new ways of thinking about the philosophers Nehamas discusses and about the discipline of philosophy itself. (shrink)

Flagging labor governance in far-flung supply networks has prompted greater scrutiny of instrumental CSR and calls for models that are tethered more closely to accountability, constraint, and oversight. Political CSR is an apt response, but this paper seeks to buttress its deliberative moorings by arguing that the agonist notion of ‘domesticated conflict’ provides a necessary foundation for substantive deliberation. Because deliberation is more viable and effective when coupled with some means of coercion, a concept of CSR solely premised on reciprocal (...) corporate-stakeholder engagement is pre-mature; efforts should first be directed toward the antecedents of reciprocity and how it is to be achieved, and only then does deliberation become a reliably substantive exercise. The resulting account of agonistic CSR is generated through agonistic principles of realism, pro-action, contestation, and countervailence, and illustrated by the Bangladesh Accord. (shrink)

Recent studies of peacebuilding highlight the importance of attending to people’s local experiences of conflict and cooperation. This trend, however, raises the fundamental questions of how the local is and should be constituted and what the relationship is between institutions and individual actors of peace at the local level of politics. I turn to Hannah Arendt’s thoughts to address these issues. Arendt’s thinking provides a distinctive form of realism that calls for stable institutions but never depletes the spirit of resistance. (...) Peacebuilding guided by this insight seeks to enable parties in conflict to voice their competing opinions by acting agonistically in public and to help them align their disruptive yet creative voices with a desire to establish and sustain common institutions. Thus, Arendt’s thinking not only offers a way to increase sensitivity to local differences but also to provide direction to the politics of resistance. In the end, it offers a balanced insight into peacebuilding and local agency beyond the contemporary liberal and critical approaches to peace. (shrink)

It has often been argued that Hannah Arendt ‘let off’ Eichmann through her concept of the banality of evil. In this paper I argue, through revisiting and modifying the concept of the banality of evil, that we can reject such criticism. That is, by judging that a perpetrator, like Eichmann, commits evil banally in no way undermines the grounds for holding them to be responsible for their actions, but it does help us to understand why such perpetrators act as they (...) do and to teach us how we might prevent such evil from occurring again. (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.

Hannah Arendt disavowed the title of “philosopher,” and is known above all as a political theorist. But the relationship between philosophy and politics animates her entire oeuvre. We find her addressing the topic in The Human Condition (1958), in Between Past and Future (a collection of essays written in the early 1960s), and in Men in Dark Times (another collection of essays, this one from the late sixties). It is treated in her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, composed during the (...) seventies, and also in the posthumous Life of the Mind, two of three projected volumes of which were complete when she died in 1975. Certainly, Arendt’s thought cannot be understood without taking into account her deep suspicion of and equally deep commitment to philosophy in the context of political reflection. For all that, her writings on this abiding preoccupation do not gel into a systematically articulated theory or programmatic statement. Instead, they reflect Arendt’s appreciation of what remained for her a “vital tension” – an enigma. (shrink)

In the literature on Hannah Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, two sorts of claim have been made by different interpreters. First, there is Beiner’s observation that there is a shift in Arendt’s thoughts on judgment, which has led to the idea that Arendt develops two distinct theories of judgment. The second sort of claim concerns Arendt’s use of Kant’s transcendental principles. At its core, it has led to the critique that Arendt detranscendentalizes — or empiricalizes — Kant, by linking (...) Kant’s judgments of taste to an empirical sociability. In this article, I argue against both of these claims. Early fragments of Arendt’s on judgment make clear that she develops only one theory of judgment. It is only that it is not until later in her life that she fully elaborates it. Nor does Arendt confuse Kant’s idea of enlarged thinking with an actual dialogue with others. In fact, Arendt introduces an interesting interdependence between judgment and speech, or communication. I develop my argument by first outlining the problems Arendt hoped to resolve via judgment. Through my reading of the Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, I show how Arendt interprets Kant’s Critique of Judgment not as his theory of aesthetic judgments, but as an answer to the more general question ‘How do I judge?’ I also clarify the difference Arendt draws between common sense and community sense. With community sense, Arendt uncovers a foundation not only for men as political beings but also for the idea of humanity. This finding is often overlooked in the literature. I conclude with another Arendtian distinction that is often overlooked, that between spectators and the solitary philosopher. (shrink)

What is the significance of Arendt considering the title Amor Mundi for what we now are familiar with as The Human Condition? Read alongside Native American philosophers, it is clear that The Human Condition does not explain what it is like to love the world. Instead, it is a powerful genealogy of world alienation and earth alienation in the Western tradition. In other words, The Human Condition shows how Western thought lost and/or undermines amor mundi. By comparing and contrasting Arendt (...) with Vine Deloria Jr. and Daniel Wildcat, we can better understand what Arendt means by the distinction between ‘world’ and ‘earth’ and see the limitations of her concept of world. My claim is that reading these thinkers together enriches our understanding of world alienation, earth alienation, and amor mundi. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt has a particular notion of thinking that both is and is not philosophical. While not guided by the search for meta principles, nor concerned with establishing logical systems, her notion of thinking as the examination of “whatever happens to come to pass,” and its significance for saving our world from thoughtlessness, retains and is motivated by the fundamental pathos at the heart of philosophy—wonder. In this paper, I consider the limiting and enabling sense in which Arendt invokes “wonder” (...) for the possibility of thinking. I do so, in turn, to explore what the pathos of wonderment might offer education—an institution charged with cultivating “thinking” and, yet, constantly susceptible to the thoughtless trappings of technocratic jargon and the mechanical logic of assessment, learning processes and social reproduction. Can wonder—the very pathos of philosophy—cultivate a thinking that helps us retain an “unclouded attentiveness” to what is educational in education? Might wonder help us to overcome the thoughtlessness that dulls our attention to what we do to each other through education? (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe role of exemplification and exemplars is receiving increasing attention in educational theory. Usually, this is connected to emulation models in character and moral education. Exemplars in this framework are those who show us how to act and what to do, and inspire us emotionally to improve. In Hannah Arendt’s unfinished work on judgement, the exemplar plays a different role. Instead of functioning as an inspiration for behavioural change, the exemplar inspires thinking. In Men in Dark Times and the lecture (...) series ‘Some questions of moral philosophy’, we find a collection of texts describing in detail some of the intellectual inspirations for Arendt’s work on exemplarity and judgement. In this paper, I will use an exploration of these texts as a starting point for considering the role of exemplarity in the development of educational judgement. (shrink)

The article asks why and how Hannah Arendt framed The Human Condition as a history of modern science. It answers that, in telling the history of instrumental rationality and the work of the experim...

In this article, we examine the political and educational relevance of Hannah Arendt’s account of friendship. Drawing from Arendt’s central works on friendship, we offer a novel interpretation of the concept by connecting the notion with the idea of educational ‘love for the world’, amor mundi. With this interpretation, we seek to demonstrate that the concept of friendship has both direct educational and indirect political significance. Thereby, we distinguish our interpretation from two previous understandings of the educational relevance of the (...) Arendtian notion of friendship—those by (1) Aaron Schutz and Marie G. Sandy, and (2) Morten T. Korsgaard—in which friendship is either assigned a specifically political role (as in (1)) or its significance to education is narrowly understood (as in (2)). We argue our interpretation of friendship offers both a new contribution to the understanding of the relationship between education and politics in the context of Arendt scholarship, and a novel way of thinking about the educational significance of friendship in the context of contemporary democratic politics, especially the prevailing political polarization. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt’s fierce critique of sovereignty, along with her excavation of Greek agonism, has gained much traction among critical theorists of international politics who revisit the basic assumptions of conventional international theories, such as state sovereignty and power as domination. This paper engages with an increasingly popular stream within such critical international studies that appropriates Arendt’s agonism to envision a form of a global public acting in concert. I argue that Arendt’s thoughts cannot be reduced to a radical vision of (...) agonistic cosmo-politics. Rather, her thinking suggests that political actors appreciate and care for their public worlds while remaining alert to institutional ossification. Her appreciation of the constitutional state confirms that state agency is an important element of her thoughts. By examining the vicissitudes of publicity found in Arendt’s thinking and their reflexive effect on inter-polity relations, the article elucidates the grounds of her international agonism and brings home a form of international politics where states pursuing the domestic goal of greatness coexist and cooperate. Thus, the study suggests that critical scholars of radical agonism miss the important implications of an “institutional” Arendt for international politics. (shrink)

On July 14, 1866 Franz Brentano stepped up to the pulpit to defend his thesis that “the true method of philosophy is none other than that of the natural sciences”. This thesis bound his first students to him and became the north star of his school, against the complex background of the progress and specialization of the natural sciences as well as the growth and professionalization of universities. I will discuss the project of the renewal of philosophy as science in (...) the School of Brentano and how this aimed to provide a scientific foundation for the humanities independently from the natural sciences, while preserving the unity of science. Through his well-known re-introduction of the concept of intentionality as criterion to distinguish internal and external perception, Brentano was able to supply an empirical foundation for the Geisteswissenschaften. While philosophy would use the method of natural science, its domain would not be nature, but consciousness: a full-blooded science of the mind that did not require a reduction to the physical in order to be scientific. Brentano’s science of consciousness was empirical, but not experimental, and relied on subjective methods, but was not introspective. Brentano’s students Carl Stumpf, Anton Marty, Alexius Meinong, Christian von Ehrenfels, Edmund Husserl and others came to occupy important chairs in philosophy throughout Europe. While they were certainly not all orthodox followers, they adapted and spread his theories far and wide in the schools and movements they founded and influenced: Gestalt psychology, Prague linguistics, phenomenology, etc.. Moreover, the 19th century idea of scientific research as a collaborative and collective achievement led to a division of labor in Brentano’s school. Each of his students was meant to work out a part of the greater whole: Stumpf, the philosophy of sound and music; Marty, language; Meinong the history of philosophy; Husserl, mathematics; etc. Yet all of them also contributed to the shared project of the renewal of philosophy as science and discussed the (foundational) relation of philosophy to other sciences in programmatic works. Though often forgotten and overlooked due to contingent historical circumstances, the scientific paradigm of the School of Brentano was very fruitful and highly influential in philosophy and the human sciences in general, throughout the second half of the 19th and into the 20th centuries. Yet it is relevant then as now to preserve the independent scientific dignity of the humanities. (shrink)

Summary This paper provides an interpretation of the movement of Arendt's thought in her Denktagebuch, from 1950 to 1973. This movement results in an incipient political philosophy based on new concepts of freedom, equality, and solidarity. As a contribution to debates on the normative foundations of Arendt's political thought, the paper seeks to show that her incipient political philosophy is based on an ethical understanding of the human condition as constituted by its openness to the divine, the worldly, and the (...) (human) Other. Despite its fragmentary nature and its politically problematic indebtedness to theological traditions, Arendt's private thought nevertheless allows us to rethink her place in the history of European ideas. Beyond that, it also provides a powerful alternative to the view that ethical and political thought must remain ?political not metaphysical? (shrink)

In recent works Nancy Fraser has developed a model of ?metademocracy? that promises to reconcile the competing claims of universal justice (grounded in human rights) and localized democracy (grounded in popular sovereignty). By instituting a global democratic procedure in which all enjoy participatory parity, Fraser hopes to ensure that some people are not denied standing as ?subjects of justice? simply because of their territorial location while keeping faith with the democratic commitment to autonomy and self-legislation. Despite the compelling nature of (...) this model, I argue that Fraser fails to bridge the gulf between justice and democracy because her model of metademocracy is built on the ?metanorm? of ?participatory parity?. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, I claim that this foundationalist move re-asserts the priority of justice over democracy because it takes equality as a moral given rather than the ever-precarious achievement of human organization. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt plačiai žinoma kaip filosofė, kuri mėgino reabilituoti senovės graikų politikos sampratą. Remiantis Žmogaus būklės skaitymu, Arendt paprastai laikoma „graikofile“, jai prikišama „Atėnų nostalgija“. Sunku paneigti Arendt simpatijas graikams – ji iš tiesų atsigręžė į atėniečių politikos supratimą, bandydama jame iškristalizuoti kertinius autentiškos politikos elementus. Vis dėlto ši interpretacija yra pernelyg vienpusiška. Didžiausius nuopelnus politikos suvokimo srityje Arendt priskiria ne graikams, o romėnams. Pastarieji žymiai geriau sprendė politikos stabilumo, tęstinumo ir tvarumo problemą. Visą dėmesį sutelkiant į veiksmą, spontaniškumą ir (...) nepaprastus žygdarbius, kyla grėsmė destabilizuoti ir „išcentruoti“ politinės bend­rijos gyvenimą. Romėnai, įvesdami tokias sąvokas kaip tradicija, autoritetas, steigties (įkūrimo) šventumas, teisė (lex), taip pat pabrėždami politinę atleidimo ir pažado reikšmę, atveria graikams svetimą politinės sedimentacijos plotmę. Ši plotmė suteikia būtinus saugiklius, be kurių tvari politinė egzistencija yra neįmanoma. (shrink)

A wave of interest in Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault as bio-political thinkers was initiated by publication of Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer. The intellectual connection of these two figures is, however, broader than their bio-political considerations. Arendt and Foucault both offer detailed accounts of an ethico-political self. Both Arendt’s and Foucault’s later work explores the meaning of living ethically and politically. By examining the relationship between self, ethics and politics, I suggest there are two general points of convergence in Arendt (...) and Foucault regarding the ethico-political self: (1) a shared suspicion of ethical or political systems presented as universally applicable; (2) the attempt to undermine prescriptive moral and political models by fostering a dynamic and critical self-relationship. In the shared attempt to develop a dynamic ethico-political attitude Arendt and Foucault present their respective alternatives to universally applicable moral and political structures, which both consider to be potentially dangerous. (shrink)

This article addresses Rancière’s critique of Aristotle’s political theory as parapolitics in order to show that Aristotle is a resource for developing an inclusionary notion of political community. Rancière argues that Aristotle attempts to cut off politics and merely police (maintain) the community by eliminating the political claim of the poor by including it. I respond to three critiques that Rancière makes of Aristotle: that he ends the political dispute by including the demos in the government; that he includes the (...) free masses only incidentally because, by chance, the rule is political, not based on mastery; and that he attempts to close off politics by determining in advance what speech counts as speech. I argue that Aristotle attempts to institute this contest by accepting the incommensurable claims of arithmetic and geometric equality. Aristotle puts this conflict at the root of political life in such a way that serves Rancière’s larger project of perpetuating politics. (shrink)

This essay utilizes Plato's insights into the role of shame in dialogical interactions to illuminate the aesthetic dimensions of deliberative democracy. Through a close analysis of the refutation of Polus in Plato's dialogue, the "Gorgias", I show how the emotion of shame is central to the unsettling, dynamic, and transformative character of democratic engagement and political judgment identified by recent aesthetic critics of Habermas' model of communicative action and democratic deliberation. Plato's analysis of shame offers a friendly amendment to these (...) aesthetic critiques by showing how the psychological forces at the heart of shame make the outcome of our political engagements with others uncertain and unsettling, even while they make possible the kind of self-reflexivity necessary to foster the deliberative virtue of sincerity or truthfulness. (shrink)

Nazi evil makes the people of Eichmann, this is the whole context of the banality of evil. The destruction of Nazi evil is so unprecedented that it forms a whole new evil- Radical evil. Radical evil is not the change in the degree of evil, but the lack of traditional cognition or conception that suits it. Compared with the traditional evil, Radical evil cancels the concept of man itself. The banality of evil does not oppose Radical evil is a new (...) evil, does not deny its destruction, it criticizes the understanding of this evil as the devil. Replacing Radical evil with Extreme evil highlights the feature of no thinking of this evil. The banality of evil goes against words and thought, and it cannot be understood in the way of exploring the roots. The banality of evil is about thinking rather than knowing, aiming to seek meaning rather than knowledge. Thinking is a political activity, which does not directly bring knowledge and directly guide behavior, but generates independent judgment, thus helping to deal with evil. (shrink)

This paper examines Hannah Arendt’s account of the relationship between politics and morality. Many critics have argued that Arendt’s conception of political action lacks any moral foundations, while others have tried to focus on her understanding of thinking as a normative source of her ethics. In contrast to these views, I present an alternative explanation and argue that the sources of Arendt’s political ethics are located neither in the faculty of thinking nor in extrapolitical moral norms or rules, but in (...) the ontological conditions of action, specifically worldliness, natality and plurality. This interpretation allows us to make sense of Arendt’s fragmented, unsystematic accounts of the various virtues and moral dispositions required for authentic politics: courage, responsibility, care, respect, moderation, solidarity and gratitude. In particular, an inquiry into the ontological sources of political ethics provides a solid normative grounding for the two moral dispositions—promise and forgiveness—that form an explicit “moral code” of political action for Arendt. (shrink)

This book is a collection of all the papers and the essay published in the special issue “Philosophy and Meaning in Life Vol.3,” Journal of Philosophy of Life, Vol.11, No.1, 2021, pp.1-154. We held the Third International Conference on Philosophy and Meaning in Life online at the University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK, on July 21–23, 2020. This conference was co-hosted by the Birmingham Centre for Philosophy of Religion, and the Waseda Institute of Life and Death Studies. We accepted about 50 (...) presentations from around the world. Professor Lisa Bortolotti and I gave keynote lectures. After the conference, we called for papers for publication from the speakers, and we accepted seven papers and an essay for the special issue of the Journal of Philosophy of Life. We would like to give special thanks to the anonymous referees who kindly reviewed the submitted manuscripts. The accepted papers deal with a variety of topics, such as the subjective/objective debate, narrative meaning, Simone de Beauvoir, and Alain Badiou, and they are all discussed from the perspective of the philosophy of meaning in life. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article addresses Rancière's critique of Aristotle's political theory as parapolitics in order to show that Aristotle is a resource for developing an inclusionary notion of political community. Rancière argues that Aristotle attempts to cut off politics and merely police the community by eliminating the political claim of the poor by including it. I respond to three critiques that Rancière makes of Aristotle: that he ends the political dispute by including the demos in the government; that he includes the (...) free masses only incidentally because, by chance, the rule is political, not based on mastery; and that he attempts to close off politics by determining in advance what speech counts as speech. I argue that Aristotle attempts to institute this contest by accepting the incommensurable claims of arithmetic and geometric equality. Aristotle puts this conflict at the root of political life in such a way that serves Rancière's larger project of perpetuating politics. (shrink)

Explores how the concept of revolution permeates and unifies Kristeva’s body of work.

This paper aims to impregnate the concept of educational leadership with new meanings and new possibilities. I draw on Hannah Arendt’s political thought, particularly, her concepts of plurality and natality alongside the distinction she made between who and what we are, to propose a new ethics for educational leadership. An ethics of plurality and natality resists a dominant understanding of education as developing a what, namely, producing persons with particular qualities and talents. I include a research story from the field (...) of early childhood education to illustrate why pluralizing the identities of children by revealing their who-ness through pedagogical narratives should be considered as a significant dimension of contemporary educational leadership. (shrink)

The paper seeks to show that there is a distinctive and consistent method in the political thought of Hannah Arendt. It is argued that this method constitutes a salutary and potentially challenging alternative to conventional approaches in contemporary political theory. In contrast with approaches that adopt an unfortunately abstracted standpoint, resulting from the insistence that political theory answer formally to the requirements of philosophy, Arendt adopts a more mediated and phenomenologically sensitive standpoint. Rejecting influential attributions to Arendt of a method (...) resting on the use of narrative form, the paper identifies key mediations — epistemological and temporal — expressed in modulations of the theoretical voice which mark out Arendt's approach as one which aims at 'saving the appearances' of the public realm. These mediations are identified, explored and exemplified by reference to a number of Arendt's key works. This way of characterizing Arendt's distinctive method is then used to shed light on the question of the 'missing' normative dimension to her work. It is argued that Arendt sees politics as a potentially self-regulating sphere. (shrink)

among all those magnificent horned beasts at the head of which Monsieur le Préfet does us the honour of being seated, him standing at the prow of the splendid herd of the local bovine race, and taking the helm with a clear and watchful eye, while the sails, propelled by the magnificent native draught horse, carry along the straight course of prosperity the man of Champagne, who does not fear its twists and turns The Prisoner of the Buddha, Franquin, Greg, (...) Jidehem. (shrink)

Persons are creatures with a range of personal capacities. Most known to us are also people, though nothing in observation or biological theory demands that all and only people are persons, nor even that persons, any more than people, constitute a natural kind. My aim is to consider what non-personal minds are like. Darwin's Earthworms are sensitive, passionate and, in their degree, intelligent. They may even construct maps, embedded in the world they perceive around them, so as to be able (...) to construct their tunnels. Other creatures may be able to perceive that world as also accessible to other minds, and structure it by locality and temporal relation, without having many personal qualities. Non-personal mind, on both modern materialist and Plotinian grounds, may be the more usual, and the less deluded, sort of mind. (shrink)

A discussion of the influence of Martin Buber is not easily limited to the philosophical anthropology he espoused. Nor is the political thinking of Hannah Arendt easily removed from criticism of the philosophies that informed her. Both Buber and Arendt attacked the beastly shoulders of a misapplied messianism as it emerged in modern Germany. Hegel, Heidegger, Marx and to some degree Nietzsche would affect this misplacement, and Arendt and Buber for their part would enter into a shared critique that is (...) often neglected, despite promising attempts in a comparative direction made by Ellis, Engel and Riker. In this essay, I make the case that the contributions of Buber and Arendt – their shared assessments of the viability of the public realm, the need for common responsibility and the recurrent decision to engage with otherness in practical terms – point to an innovative critique of the forcible abstraction of a more traditional messianic made by German views of history. In the midst of the crises identified as correlates of a misapplied messianic, the hope as Buber and Arendt see it lies in the capacity for reflective and courageous identification and education between human individuals as they live towards one another. (shrink)

This paper is devoted to clarifying Hannah Arendt’s concept of political freedom by the means of analysing its structure. My analysis proceeds in three steps. Firstly, I distinguish a pre-political concept of freedom as exercising spontaneity, which is at the root of Arendt’s understanding of political freedom. Secondly, I analyse her account of freedom as exercising action and indicate its relationship to the elementary freedom of spontaneity. Arendt endowed action with a distinguished importance, since she assumed that it is the (...) only activity within the vita activa, which has a special anthropological and axiological significance. According to Arendt, only action allows one to truly experience the fundamental aspect of the human condition, which is the fact of human plurality; it is also the only activity which allows one to exercise specifically public principles, such as solidarity, equality, or justice. Thirdly, I indicate how these two accounts of freedom translate into Arendt’s concept of political freedom. This analysis reveals that the Arendtian concept of political freedom is markedly original. She did not define it in a usual manner, i.e. through indicating bundles of legal and political rights which determine the accepted scope of participation in the public affairs. The inherent part of her concept of political freedom is a specific account of how it must be exercised. Political freedom understood as the participation in governance exercised through action is not merely an activity of instrumental, but also anthropological and axiological importance, which is due to the special anthropological and axiological meaning of action. In the final section, I discuss the practical dimension of Arendt’s theory. She doubted whether the traditional representative democracy is capable of accommodating her ‘rich’ ideal of political freedom, therefore she proposed an alternative account of political system based on councils. I formulate objections against this proposition and demonstrate that councils would presumably fail to accommodate Arendt’s exacting account of political freedom. (shrink)

La hipótesis de este ensayo es que la fundación de la filosofía política, disciplina que Arendt definió como el intento de una huida completa de la política, puede entenderse como uno de los momentos decisivos de la conformación progresiva de lo que Foucault llamó la historia de la voluntad de saber occidental. A partir de esa suposición, examinamos en una lectura cruzada el análisis arendtiano del paso de la acción al gobierno en Platón y la lectura foucaultiana de la exclusión (...) del sofisma en Aristóteles. Mostramos finalmente en qué la arqueología del mundo de la acción anterior a la filosofía política que Arendt propone, en torno a cierta figura ambigua de Sócrates, se diferencia de la teoría estratégica del discurso que Foucault encuentra en la sofística, y nos interrogamos por las implicaciones políticas de esta diferencia, especialmente en lo que apunta a repensar hoy las relaciones entre el pensamiento y la acción. (shrink)

Arendt uses the exemplary validity of Socrates to think and value the possibilities of joint philosophical and political orientations in our present juncture. In this way Arendt’s ‘Socrates’ is not a mythic, historic, or dramatic individual, but offers an example of the best of the human condition. Unfortunately, because Arendt held the social conditioning and constraining of Socrates’ possibilities at arm’s length, his status as an exemplar is problematic and he ends up referring to a historical rather than contemporary possibilities. (...) While Arendt had resources in her notion of the ‘world’ to better ground her simultaneously analytic and normative construction of ‘Socrates’, the lack of a social grounding makes ‘Socrates’ a significantly unmoored and shifting signifier. After showing the vacillations of ‘Socrates’ in Arendt, I supplement her normatively laden account with a Weberian grounding. With this firmer social grounding, ‘Socrates’ can refer to the possibilities of joint philosophical and political orientations in ancient Athens and thereby highlight how our world makes a contemporary version unlikely or impossible. Yet, this Weberian grounding comes at a cost. The normative dimension essential in Arendt’s ‘Socrates’ is lost due to Weberian value-neutrality. ‘Socrates’ can name a contemporary unlikelihood or impossibility, but if the enveloping social order does not value what it renders impossible, Weberian ideal-types on their own are incapable of offering normative resources for critique. I conclude by blending a Weberian social mooring with Arendt’s value-laden framework for social analysis and thereby recuperate the missing normative dimension. In short, by accepting the relational, necessarily plural, and dynamic root of human action we can, much like Arendt’s intended use of ‘Socrates’, value orientations that best express these norms, and criticize contemporary conditions that constrain their realization. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIt is only recently that a few histories of interwar European political thought have come to acknowledge that its discursive framing of ethical and social crises was closely interwoven with upheavals in the ways Europeans rethought and debated God. The first aim of the present article is to restore to Karl Barth a central place in promulgating a thoroughly interdisciplinary approach to twentieth-century European ethical and political thought. Secondly, it seeks to correct the commonplace association of Barth’s theological revolution with (...) radical and authoritarian political ideologies by exploring his early political thought and activities, whilst focusing on several of his most politically and intellectually influential ideas. The article concludes with a discussion of the wider implications of rethinking Barth’s role in intellectual history. (shrink)

Current scholarship has focused on analyzing how Arendt's storytelling corresponds to her political arguments. In following up this discussion, I offer a closer examination of the unusual myth Arendt uses to explain the condition of the modern age, a myth she refers to as the ?political nature of history.? I employ literary terms along with the standard vocabulary of political theory in shaping this reading of Arendt. Following Robert C. Pirro, I also consider Arendt's story as a tragedy, but in (...) the broadest sense, that of a collision of two goods, freedom and security. By describing Arendt's thought in this manner, I hope to reveal another way in which Arendt represents the call to action that she believes so crucial to humanity, as a summons to we flawed antiheroes through the device of a heroic myth. (shrink)

If genuine political activity can only be undertaken by citizens in the public sphere in a nation-state, what of stateless people today – asylum seekers and refugees cut adrift on the high seas? This is what is at stake in Hannah Arendt’s political theory of necessity. This article reconsiders Arendt’s notion of the Greek oikos (household) as the sphere of necessity with the aim of challenging the idea that there is a condition of necessity or mere subsistence, where life is (...) reduced to satisfying basic biological needs. For Arendt, the Greek oikos is the model that provides the inspiration for her theory because necessity activities were kept quite separate from action in the polis. The ordinary and the undistinguished happen in the oikos and its equivalent, with the polis being reserved for extraordinary acts done for glory without any regard for life. The exclusionary nature of this theory of the polis as action has, at best, been treated with kid gloves by Arendt’s commentators. With reference to Heidegger on the polis and Agamben’s notion of oikonomia, I endeavour to show that the so-called ordinary is embedded in a way of life that is extraordinary and the key to grasping humanness. (shrink)

The paper offers a contribution to the political account of wonder. The rationale for addressing this problem is provided by Hannah Arendt’s observations on the paradoxical relationship between wonder and politics—wonder appears here as both essential and indispensable to politics as the realm of opinions. This quandary corresponds to two common-sense uses of the term “wonder”—as an emotion and as an act of judging. It is argued that the political interpretation of wonder should link these two poles. Drawing on Martha (...) Nussbaum’s account of wonder and its reformulation developed by Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, the paper offers such a synthesis by emphasising the environmental and aesthetic dimensions of the concept. (shrink)

Europe is facing a wave of refugees and migrants. To solve the many inherent problems is primarily a practical political task. However, there are existential experiences, democratic values, human attitudes, and political principles involved, and I am going to look particularly to the following three aspects of the refugee crisis, 1) the existential, 2) the political, and 3) the legal. Finally, I will make a concluding remark on education’s task.

This paper presents what I will call Arendt’s genealogy of thinking. My purpose in doing so is to strengthen Arendt’s critique of thoughtlessness which I believe is both a powerful, but underappreciated analytic tool and a consistent, but under-examined thread that occurs throughout Arendt’s oeuvre. To do so I revisit her phenomenology of thinking and the distinction between thinking and cognition she introduces in her last, unfinished work, The Life of the Mind. When read alongside the genealogy of action in (...) The Human Condition to create a parallel genealogy of thinking, we can begin to see that the implications of this distinction between thinking and cognition are radical, challenging, and deeply important. (shrink)

El primer propósito de este artículo es considerar el fenómeno del pensamiento en Hannah Arendt. El segundo propósito es establecer en qué sentido, según esta autora, la actividad del pensamiento puede ser una condición contra la maldad. Como en su determinación del pensar Hannah Arendt se vuelve polémicamente contra todo intento por ver el pensar ya como un ejercicio intelectual, ya como una actividad puramente mental, ya como la fundación o prosecución de tradiciones de pensamiento, ya como el monopolio de (...) unos pocos, ya como la elaboración de doctrinas o sistemas…, el texto muestra subrepticiamente esta confrontación constante de Arendt con la tradición filosófica. Tal confrontación con la tradición filosófica tiene lugar al hilo de una conversación permanente con Sócrates, en cuyos diálogos advirtió Hannah Arendt un ejemplo inequívoco de la actividad del pensamiento. (shrink)

Resumo Este artigo examina as considerações de Nietzsche acerca das fontes sociais e históricas do eu como um contra-argumento à concepção liberal de indivíduo. Defendo que Nietzsche oferece não apenas uma crítica contundente à concepção associal e previamente individuada de pessoa, à qual se conecta a noção liberal de liberdade, como ainda um contra-conceito alternativo de pessoa e de soberania. Seus argumentos visam mostrar, em sua dimensão crítica, que o indivíduo ou pessoa é inseparável de seus objetivos ou valores, que (...) são socialmente constituídos, e que nossa capacidade como indivíduos, especialmente para a agência soberana, é o produto de uma longa história e pré-história social. Em sua dimensão construtiva, encontramos em Nietzsche a contra alegação de que a manutenção e o cultivo de nossas capacidades são dependentes de relações de um antagonismo ponderado entre nós mesmos enquanto indivíduos, ou antes: como dividua. Esses argumentos serão desenvolvidos no que se segue em consonância com quatro principais linhas de pensamento: sobre as origens sociais e o caráter da consciência ; sobre a história e a constituição social de nossa capacidade como indivíduos soberanos [sovereign] ; sobre as origens sociais do fenômeno moral ; e sobre a destruição fisiológica do sujeito moral substancial, seguida da reconstrução fisiológica.This essay examines Nietzsche's thought on the social and historical sources of the self as a counter-argument against the liberal concept of the individual. Nietzsche, it is argued, offers a powerful critique of the asocial, antecedently individuated concept of personhood, to which the liberal notion of freedom is attached, but also an alternative counter-concept of personhood and sovereignty. On the critical side are arguments to the effect that the individual or person is inseparable from its ends or values, which in turn are socially constituted, and that our capacities as individuals, especially for sovereign agency, are the product of a long social history and pre-history. On the positive side is the constructive counter-claim that the maintenance and cultivation of our capacities for productive, autonomous agency is dependent on relations of measured antagonism both between and within us as individuals, or rather: as dividua. These arguments are reconstructed along four main lines of thought: on the social origins and character of consciousness ; on the history and social constitution of our capacities as sovereign individuals ; on the social origins of moral phenomena, understood as internalisations of communal norms ; and Nietzsche's physiological destruction of the substantial moral subject, coupled with the physiological reconstruction of the subject as dividuum. (shrink)