This article analyses ChatGPT from the perspective of the philosophy of education. It explores ChatGPT’s implications for universities, focussing on the intertwined concepts of critical thinking, the crisis of higher education, and humanity. Does ChatGPT sound the death knell for critical thinking and, thus, exacerbate the oft-diagnosed ‘crisis in education’? And is ChatGPT really a convenient, but dangerous, tool to outsource humanity to machines?. In addressing these questions, the article’s two main arguments offer an alternative to both triumphalist and overly (...) pessimistic narratives: first, ChatGPT can lead to a revitalisation of critical thinking in higher education. However, it arrives at this conclusion not from the triumphalist viewpoint that celebrates ChatGPT’s (allegedly) limitless potential, but from the more sober perspective that ChatGPT combines remarkable strengths with considerable weaknesses and built-in limitations. Secondly, ChatGPT can prompt a return to the qualities that distinguish humans from calculating machines and (re)instate critical thinking as the pivotal virtue of higher education. The article arrives at this conclusion by rejecting the overly pessimistic concern with ‘outsourcing humanity’ and endorsing the idea that ChatGPT lays bare a ‘crisis in education’ that constitutes, simultaneously, a precious opportunity. Finally, the article stresses that this opportunity inevitably comes at a price. There will be winners and losers of the ChatGPT revolution and there is a danger that ChatGPT reintroduces elitism through the back door. One urgent task of the near future, therefore, will be to keep this danger in check. (shrink)

In recent years, democratic theorists have inquired into the aesthetic dimension of contemporary politics. Influenced by Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière, these scholars claim that there is an analogy between democratic politics and aesthetic experiences, since both involve the confrontation of an indeterminacy that cannot be overcome by means of rational argumentation. Contributing to this perspective, but challenging some of Rancière’s insights, this article shows the importance of Jean-François Lyotard’s writings on aesthetics for understanding what I call ‘democratic aesthetics’. This (...) aesthetics, I argue, consists in works of art that bring representation to its limits, thus arousing an experience of the unpresentable. Influenced by Immanuel Kant’s analysis of the sublime, Lyotard claims that avant-garde art, by disrupting the rules of representational art, put representation as such into question. This experience of the unpresentable contributes to cultivating a readiness to listening to voices that are not yet heard, because they lack a discourse by which to express themselves. Given that politics in postmodernity, following Lyotard, consists in shifting the dividing line between the sayable and the unsayable, avant-garde art is conductive to a postmodern politics – which, I argue, is analogous to democratic politics. (shrink)

In this article, I offer a novel and in-depth account of how, for Kant, free speech is the mechanism that moves a society closer to justice. I argue that the criticism of the legislator preserved by free speech must also be the result of collective agreement. I further argue that structural features of judgements of taste and the sensus communis give guidance for how we should communicate publicly to succeed at the aims Kant has laid out, as judgements of taste, (...) like politics, belong fundamentally to a transitional sphere between nature and freedom. (shrink)

Hanna Pitkin explains that Arendt’s defense of collective political action tends to reify and mystify an opposing concept Arendt calls ‘the Social’. Was Arendt actually right about the rise of ‘the Social’? Does the deep-set global mass entertainment culture tend to sap action even when it purportedly celebrates it? And what can viewing publics and counter-publics tell us about the meaning and reception of ‘the Social’, especially in this massively online era? This article surveys different ways of thinking about the (...) basic problem presented by American popular action cinema, and especially big-budget Hollywood action films, through an Arendtian lens. In presenting this overview, the article looks to reorient traditional philosophical concerns about screen violence and its censorship, and to offer a holistic reappraisal of ‘the Social’ and ‘action’ by placing democratic theory in closer dialogue with film studies. (shrink)

Forgiveness is often understood as a primarily interpersonal experience, a type of moral response to a wrongdoing that has particular effects on the personal relationship between the one wronged and the wrongdoer. However, some have also attempted to defend another kind of forgiveness, one that takes place in public and applies to a wider range of practices in a specifically political context. That such a concept of forgiveness is possible is not particularly controversial. But the way that this political forgiveness (...) is unified—if it is unified—with personal forgiveness has not been clarified. By approaching the question phenomenologically, it becomes possible to root forgiveness, both personal and political, in the more fundamental context of the shared human world. Hannah Arendt's analysis of forgiveness does just this. In so doing, Arendt accounts for both the role of forgiveness in private human relationships and the way in which this role is fundamentally political. (shrink)

The division of political scientists into philosophers and sociologists is an important factor behind their inability to understand politics. Sociologists are incapable of grasping the whole, philosophers are bad at understanding particularities. The aim of the paper is to show the inadequacy of both of these forms of knowledge. Immanuel Kant’s conception of aesthetic judgement allows us to gain a better understanding of politics. Hannah Arendt attempted to explain Kant’s Critique of Judgment as an important treatise for political philosophy. The (...) power of judgement opens up a broad horizon for our imagination. Ideas can be associated with various different appearances and this is why reliable theoretical definition of politics is impossible. It is impossible to ascribe an adequate object of experience to the idea of politics and for this very reason various substitutes are used. The formation of these substitutes corresponds to the requirements of the power of judgement that connects universality to particularity. The analysis of the aesthetic judgement reveals why attempts to define politics face unsolvable difficulties. Philosophers and sociologists attempt to gain a theoretical understanding of an object which belongs to the realm of aesthetic judgement. The article does not provide an answer to the problem of definition of politics, it shows why such a definition is impossible. (shrink)

Moral particularists and generalists alike have struggled over how to incorporate the role of moral salience in ethical reasoning. In this paper, I point to neglected resources in Kant to account for the role of moral salience in maxim formation: Kant's theory of reflective judgment. Kant tasks reflective judgment with picking out salient empirical particulars for formation into maxims, associating it with purposiveness, or intentional activity (action on ends). The unexpected resources in Kantian reflective judgment suggest the possibility of a (...) particularist universalism, where recalcitrant particulars directly inform, and in some cases revise, moral principles. Such an account improves on particularist accounts of moral salience and moral perception: rather than deriving moral sensitivity solely from an agent's upbringing or cultural resources, the reflective dimension is situated alongside the universalist dimension of moral principles typically identified with Kantian ethics, allowing for a critical approach both to moral universals and to the reception of moral particulars. (shrink)

This article examines a population-based opportunistic screening practice for cognitive impairment that takes place at a hospital in Sweden. At the hospital, there is a routine in place that stipulates that all patients over the age of 65 who are admitted to the ward will be offered testing for cognitive impairment, unless they have been tested within the last six months or have been diagnosed with any form of cognitive impairment. However, our analysis shows that this routine is not universally (...) and mechanically applied. Rather, the health care professionals have developed and use an ethico-political judgment, concerning, for example,whomto test,whento offer the tests, andhowto explain and perform them. This article explores the role and practice of this form of judgment, emphasising its political and ethical nature. The analysis is based on qualitative interviews with professionals and patients, and draws on the theories of Aristotle and Hannah Arendt. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, Volume 53, Issue 1, Page 76-92, Spring 2022.

This essay contributes to developing a new approach to political legitimacy by asking what is involved in judging the legitimacy of a regime from a practical point of view. It is focused on one aspect of this question: the role of identity in such judgment. I examine three ways of understanding the significance of identity for political legitimacy: the foundational, associative, and agonistic picture. Neither view, I claim, persuasively captures the dilemmas of judgment in the face of disagreement and uncertainty (...) about who “I” am and who “we” are. I then propose a composite, pragmatic picture. This view casts the question of political legitimacy as an existential predicament: it is fundamentally a question about who you are—both as a person and as a member of collectives. The pragmatic picture integrates rational, prudential, and ethical qualities of good judgment that were heretofore associated with mutually exclusive ways of theorizing legitimacy. It also implies that the question of legitimacy cannot be resolved philosophically. (shrink)

Political theorists have traditionally grappled with laughter by posing a simple, normative question: ‘What role, if any, should laughter play in the polis?’ However, the outsized presence of laughter in contemporary politics has rendered this question increasingly obsolete. What good does determining laughter’s role in the polis do when the polis itself is to a large extent shaped by laughter? The present essay argues that Kant’s aesthetic investigations of laughter in the Critique of Judgment and Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point (...) of View offer a much needed alternative to the normative discourse. Kant theorizes laughter as an intensely dialectical experience — at once an aesthetic judgment and an affect. Laughter in Kant enacts dissensus: it disrupts and transforms sensus communis, or the ways subjects see and hear the world in common that organize and structure a political community. The essay illustrates the advantages of a Kantian conception of the politics of laughter over the normative discourse by examining Dave Chappelle’s controversial 2019 stand-up comedy special Sticks & Stones. It concludes that the dissensus enacted by laughter, while not necessarily democratic, provides a privileged opening for democratic politics. (shrink)

Kant does not completely work out his philosophical conception of enlightenment. The definition of enlightenment that he offers in his well-known essay on the topic does not seem to completely match the definition that he puts forward later in his essay on the pantheism controversy and in the third Critique. It remains unclear how the two definitions relate to each other and whether and how they rest on the same principle. The lack of clarity in Kant’s conception of enlightenment is (...) left mostly unaddressed in the secondary literature on the topic. This paper suggests that Kant’s philosophical conception of enlightenment rests on the discipline of pure reason. The self-disciplinary principle of reason, which is laid out in the Doctrine of Method of the first Critique, underlies both of Kant’s definitions of enlightenment, although he himself does not clearly demonstrate how it does so. (shrink)

The purpose of the article is to study ethical problematics in the philosophical works of Alasdair MacIntyre and Hannah Arendt. On the one hand we have the analysis of virtues ethics and of its place in modern society, and on the other hand, we have the analysis of action and judgment as scopes of person’s self-representation, which are valuable by themselves. MacIntyre developed his hypothesis about an individual biography pointing out that modern emotivism ethics does not leave a room for (...) conscious ethical worldview, reduces the scope of ethical choice to the very statement of individual preference. By that, a sequence of ethical decisions and preferences in a person’s life acquires irrational and wayward nature, due to which conscious transition from one narrative to another becomes impossible. In its turn, the possibility of individual biography as a holistic story that everyone can tell about themselves provides such an informative nature of ethical views, which have features of a narrative that can be rationally told and rationally perceived by others. Hannah Arendt analyzed the issue of modern ethical crisis from the other side – she studied the ethical dimension of judging ability and the role of action in social interaction. An action becomes the strictly human scope of human activity, in which personality can “open up”. Judging ability appears in this context as a foundation, thanks to which a person becomes able to act: ethical worldview exists in terms of evaluation of something that exists in relation to something due. An action in this context is an active embodiment of a certain worldview position that “unfolds” itself precisely in the area of ethics while being involved in interpersonal interaction. Arendt claimed that an action, due to its nature, is unpredictable and that every human being, who dares to take it, risks getting, in the end, a result that is far from their intentions. Exactly because of it, an action exists in the actor’s biography and the fabrics of interpersonal connections simultaneously – it is the latter, which gives the space for interpretation of an actor’s actions significance. Thus, the individual biography becomes the thing that makes sense only through the prism of interpersonal interaction and mutual interpretations of individual stories. (shrink)

This paper examines how a delusive social imaginary of criminal-justice has underpinned contemporary U.S. mass incarceration and encouraged widespread indifference to its violence. I trace the complicity of this criminal-justice imaginary with state-organized violence by comparing it to an imaginary that supported colonial violence. I conclude by discussing how those of us outside of prison can begin to resist the entrenched images and institutions of mass incarceration by engaging the work and imagining the perspective of incarcerated people.

ABSTRACT: The concept of the “banality of evil,” put forward by Hannah Arendt to describe the psychological profile of the Nazi criminal in Eichmann in Jerusalem, is intimately tied to her reading of Plato. In Arendt’s examination of the question of evil, she found some support in Kant’s philosophy. However, the problem of guilt under Nazism ultimately goes back to an inability to think. The two-in-one, a concept which describes the activity of thinking, is based on Plato’s dialogues. An examination (...) of these philosophical sources contributes to the understanding of the possibilities and the limits of Arendt’s reflection on evil. RÉSUMÉ : Le concept de banalité du mal, proposé par Hannah Arendt pour décrire le profil psychologique du criminel nazi dans Eichmann in Jerusalem, est intimement lié à ses lectures de Platon. Pour aborder la question du mal, elle a découvert des appuis chez Kant, mais le problème de la culpabilité sous le régime nazi renvoie ultimement au défaut de penser. Le deux-en-un, concept qui décrit la pensée, a été défini sur la base de l’oeuvre platonicienne. L’examen de ces sources philosophiques permet de mieux comprendre les possibilités et les limites de la réflexion arendtienne sur le mal. (shrink)

This article addresses Hannah Arendt’s controversial engagement with European imperial ventures in Africa. For many of her critics, Arendt’s description of imperialism either duplicates the ideologically inflected accounts and justifications of mass-murder, or conveys her own personal views of Africans and peoples of African descent. I argue that Arendt’s account in the “Imperialism” chapter of the Origins of Totalitarianism must be read parallel to her discussion of the conflict in Palestine between Jewish settlers and native Arabs. Rather than provide us (...) with an anthropological account of Africans, Arendt provides a political account of the necessity for cooperation in order to blunt imperial power-politics. In a second move, I develop a normative critique from Arendt’s remarks by relying on Heideggerian aspects of “World.” I argue that Arendt’s criticisms are really directed at Europeans who were unable to take the Africans’ point of view. (shrink)

Human rights are both a means for the ideological justification of the status quo and for its utopian subversion. In order to account for this paradox we need to consider the role that our capacity to form images plays in human rights discourses. I will first discuss how best to conceptualise the capacity to produce images, which is the focus of this paper. In order to go beyond the impasse generated by philosophical approaches to imagination as an individual faculty, and (...) by sociological approaches to the imaginary understood as a social context, I propose to use the category of the ‘imaginal’, understood simply as that which is made of images and can therefore be both the product of an individual faculty and a social context. Second, I show how the imaginal enters the three major strategies of justifications of human rights, when we think of them as ‘human’, as ‘rights’ and as ‘rational’. Finally, I will show that the imaginal is also the force that compels us to enforce human rights, to put ourselves in the shoes of others and imagine a world that is different from the one in which we are currently living. (shrink)

This article presents Hannah Arendt's novel conception of evil, arguing that what animates and undergirds this conception is an understanding of human agency, of what it means to be a person at all. The banality of evil that Arendt theorizes is exactly the failure to become a person in the first place—it is, in short, the evil of being a nobody. For Arendt, this evil becomes extreme when a mass of such nobodies becomes organized by totalitarianism. This article focuses on (...) the connection between Arendt's understanding of personhood and her conception of evil, showing how Arendt falls into a Kantian tradition of prioritizing apperception— thinking—as central for human agency. In this way, the article shows that thinking—being a person—is central to Arendt's work, thereby prioritizing and making sense of her claim in _The Human Condition_ that one is never “more active” than when thinking. (shrink)

Contrary to much Kant interpretation, this article argues that Kant's moral philosophy, including his account of charity, is irrelevant to justifying the state's right to redistribute material resources to secure the rights of dependents (the poor, children, and the impaired). The article also rejects the popular view that Kant either does not or cannot justify anything remotely similar to the liberal welfare state. A closer look at Kant's account of dependency relations in “The Doctrine of Right” reveals an argumentative structure (...) sufficient for a public institutional protection of dependents and evidence that Kant identifies concerns of economic justice as lying at the heart of the state's legitimacy. (shrink)

This paper argues that Hegel attempts to appropriate the irreversible aspects of Romantic aesthetics in four ways: (i) Hegel radicalizes Kantian aesthetics on the basis of a basically textual approach to sublime experience that opens up the question of community as a philosophical one; (ii) without demoting classical conceptions of art, Hegel privileges Romantic conceptions that demonstrate the ascendancy of sign over symbol in a spiraling chain; (iii) Hegel laments the fate of art in the triumph of Romantic subjectivism but (...) also suggests how communities can reconstitute themselves on the horizon of aesthetic dissolution; so that, finally, (iv) art can be reconceived as a emancipatory adventure that redefines metaphysics through its historical unfolding as an unending series of semiotic transformations. (shrink)

The article examines the political challenge and significance of forgiveness as an indispensable response to the inherently imperfect and tragic nature of political life through the lens of the existential, narrative-inspired judging sensibility. While the political significance of forgiveness has been broadly recognized in transitional justice and reconciliation contexts, the question of its importance and appropriateness in the wake of grave injustice and suffering has commonly been approached through constructing a self-centred, rule-based framework, defining forgiveness in terms of a moral (...) duty or virtue. Reliant on a set of prefabricated moral standards, however, this approach risks abstracting from the historical, situated condition of human political existence and thus arguably stands at a remove from the very quandaries and imperfections of the political world, which it purports to address. Against this background, this article draws on Albert Camus’s and Hannah Arendt’s aesthetic, worldly judging sensibility and its ability to kindle the process of coming to terms with the absurd, and perhaps unforgivable character of reality after evil. As an aptitude to engage the world in its particularity, plurality and contingency rather than seeking to subdue and tame it under prefabricated standards of thought, namely, worldly judgement is able to reveal how past tragedies have arisen from the ambiguity of human engagement in the world and thereby also elicit the distinctly human capacities of beginning anew and resisting such actions in the future. As such, I suggest, it is well-suited to bring into clearer focus and confront the main political challenge and significance of forgiveness: how to acknowledge the seriousness of the wrongs committed, yet also enable the possibility of a new beginning and restore among former enemies the sense of responsibility for the shared world. (shrink)

In this essay, I trace a rhetorical affinity between feminist postmodern theory and an Enlightenment narrative of development. This affinity consists in the valorization of mobility and the repudiation of locatedness. Although feminists deploy this rhetoric in order to accommodate differences and to accustom readers to the instability that results from such accommodation, I show how this rhetoric works to justify Western colonial development and to efface women's very different experiences of mobility in the early twenty-first century.

Recent reform initiatives calling for ‘civic’ professionalism can be seen as a response to the widely reported decline in public trust in the professions and an attempt to partially remedy this problem through a more publically engaged professionalism. The author draws on the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt, identifying the strong, albeit in the professionalism literature rarely acknowledged, affinities between civic professionalism and her concept of action as freedom through public deliberation. Using the three modalities of the active life that (...) Arendt discusses in The Human Condition as analytical tools, the author suggests that changing conditions in the public sector have led to professional life increasingly taking on the forms of labour and work, at the expense of action. The implications of these developments are highlighted before the author proceeds to show that a professional life oriented strongly towards action is consistent with ‘civic’ professionalism based on community engagement. Some of the main approaches traditionally taken to promote a civic orientation among university students are noted; the article concludes with a discussion of how the specific concepts underlying Arendtian action can be put to work in university pedagogies to intentionally promote the public ‘civic-minded professional’. (shrink)

The works of György Márkus and Hannah Arendt represent two irreconcilable tendencies of contemporary radical philosophy. Whereas Márkus’s critical theory of culture actively refrains from attributing metaphysical significance to its heuristic concepts and the mutable practices they contingently designate, Arendt’s phenomenological methodology attempts to elucidate the constitution of the modern world in order to evince the ontological significance of the political. Due to the inimical nature of their respective projects, Márkus’s writings largely consign its references to Arendt to marginalia. In (...) this article, I consider the exception by taking as my point of departure Márkus’s only substantive comments about Arendt in ‘Beyond the Dichotomy: Poiesis and Praxis’. From a culturological perspective, I then reconstruct the ambivalent conceptions tacitly inhering in Arendt’s principal accounts of culture. In doing so, I reaffirm that Arendt denigrates poiesis, but also show that she regards culture and cultural reception as derivative to the political and praxis. The purpose of this exposition is not to resolve the dispute in one or the other direction, but to render perspicuous the fundamental choice evident in their opposition. (shrink)

In an effort to delineate a more plausible account of political change, this paper reads Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory as a corrective to exaggerated enthusiasm about the emancipatory force of reflection. This revised account valorizes both Bourdieu’s insights into the acquired, embodied, durable nature of the political habitus and judgment theorists’ trust in individuals’ reflection as a perpetual force of novelty and spontaneity in the public sphere of democratic societies. The main purpose of this exercise is to reveal the mix (...) of continuity and discontinuity that is characteristic of most transformations in the political common sense of democratic societies. In other words, this paper seeks to offer a more complex understanding of the inertial character of reflective judgment and of the difficulty of shifting the categories that define the political common sense. By cross-pollinating the ever-growing literature on reflective judgment and Bourdieu’s sombre theory of politics, we can better calibrate our expectations regarding the possibilities of significant democratic transformation in late capitalist societies. (shrink)

Democratic theorists are usually dismissive about the idea that citizens act “through” their representatives and often hold persons to exercise true political agency only at intervals in elections. Yet, if we want to understand representative government as a proper form of democracy and not just a periodical selection of elites, continuous popular agency must be a feature of representation. This article explores the Kantian attempt to justify that people can act “through” representatives. I call this the “exercise view” of representation (...) and defend its superiority to the “opportunity view,” which I attribute to Locke. It is superior because it has a robust conception of rationality and collective action, allowing us to understand how representation can mediate public reason. (shrink)

What can Hannah Arendt's writings offer to current thinking on the environment? Although there are some obvious connections between her work and current issues in environmental ethics, not very much has been written on the topic. This article argues that Arendt's philosophy is particularly fruitful for environmental thinking because she explicitly links the material and biological conditions of human existence with the political conditions of human freedom. This is articulated in the article as the requirement of both constrained consumption and (...) unconstrained deliberation. The article elaborates these notions before concluding that Arendt's philosophy uniquely combines the existential task of self-understanding with the practical task of confronting our environmental challenges. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to reassess the conceptual link between politics and our capacity to create images. Although a lot has been written on what we can call the ‘politics of imagination’, much less has been done to critically assess the conceptual link between the two in a systematic way. This paper introduces the concept of imaginal, understood simply as what is made of images, to go beyond the current impasse of the opposition between theories of imagination as (...) an individual faculty, on the one hand, and theories of the imaginary as a social context, on the other. As such, I also argue that the concept of imaginal is the theoretical tool most adapted to capture the nature of the conceptual link between politics and our capacity to produce images. This analysis is finally applied to contemporary politics and it is shown to be able to bring light to many of its paradoxes, including that of a political world full of images, but deprived of imagination. (shrink)

In this article I present an original interpretation of Roy Bhaskar’s project in Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom. His major move is to separate an ontological dialectic from a critical dialectic, which in Hegel are laminated together. The ontological dialectic, which in Hegel is the self-unfolding of spirit, becomes a realist and relational philosophical anthropology. The critical dialectic, which in Hegel is confined to retracing the steps of spirit, now becomes an active force, dialectical critique, which interposes into the ontological (...) dialectic at the ‘fourth dimension’ of a naturalistically reconfigured account of relational human nature, agency. This account allows Bhaskar to explain and vindicate the crucial role social criticism must play in any realistic project of self-emancipation, and to create a space that didn’t exist in Hegel for an open-ended concrete utopianism. Freedom is thus the actualization of human nature, but is not automatic: the relation of human nature to freedom is mediated historically through dialectical critique, which, informed by concrete utopianism, can have emancipatory power. Content Type Journal Article Category Article Pages 13-44 Authors Craig Reeves, Brunel University Journal Journal of Critical Realism Online ISSN 1572-5138 Print ISSN 1476-7430 Journal Volume Volume 12 Journal Issue Volume 12, Number 1 / 2013. (shrink)

This article builds on Arendt’s development of a Kantian politics from out of the conception of reflective judgment in the Critique of Judgment. Arendt looks to Kant’s analysis of the beautiful to explain how political thought can be conceived. And yet Arendt describes such Kantian reflection as an empirical undertaking that justifies itself only in relation to the abstract principle of the moral law. The problem for such an account is that the autonomy of the moral law appears to be (...) at odds with the social cohesion of Kantian political life. The ensuing contradiction can be deemed the antinomy of political judgment. Kant’s conception of reflective judgment offers such an inquiry considerably more to work with than Arendt uncovers. In particular, the regulative principle of the purposiveness of nature that is shown to direct all reflection can be seen to offer the solution to this antinomy. (shrink)

Psychologists investigating dreams in non-Western cultures have generally not considered the meanings of dreams within the unique meaning-structure of the person in his or her societal context. The study was concerned with explicating the indigenous system of dream interpretation of the Xhosa-speaking people, as revealed by acknowledged dream experts, and elaborating upon the life-world of the participants. Fifty dreams and their interpretations were collected from participants, who were traditional healers and their clients. A phenomenological methodology was adopted in explicating the (...) data. Themes explicated included : the physiognomy of the dreamer's life-world as revealed by significant dreams, the interpretation of significant dreams as revealed through action, and human bodiliness as revealed in dream interpretations. The participants' approach to dreams is not based upon an explicit theory, but upon an immediate and pathic understanding of the dream phenomenon. The understanding is based upon the interpreter's concrete understanding of the life-world, which includes the possibility of cosmic integration and continuity between personal and trans-personal realms of being. (shrink)

Kant identifies the “highest moral-physical good” as that combination of “good living” and “true humanity” which best harmonises in a “good meal in good company”. Why does Kant privilege the dinner party in this way? By examining Kant’s accounts of enlightenment, cosmopolitanism, love and respect, and gratitude and friendship, the answer to this question becomes clear. Kant’s moral ideal is that of an enlightened and just cosmopolitan human being who feels and acts with respect and love for all persons and (...) such an ideal is temporarily manifested in the sort of social interaction achievable at a good dinner party. (shrink)

In Eichmann in Jerusalem , Hannah Arendt struggled to defend the possibility of judgment against the obvious problems encountered in attempts to offer legally valid and morally meaningful judgments of those who had committed crimes in morally bankrupt communities. Following Norrie, this article argues that Arendt’s conclusions in Eichmann are equivocal and incoherent. Exploring her perspectival theory of judgment, the article suggests that Arendt remains trapped within certain Kantian assumptions in her philosophy of history, and as such sees the question (...) of freedom in a binary way. The article argues that Adorno’s philosophy of freedom provides the resources to diagnose and overcome Arendt’s shortcomings. Adorno’s position provides a way of embracing the antinomical character of judgment, by emphasising the need for elements of reason and nature in the phenomenon of freedom. In Adorno’s lights, judgment becomes an attempt to express a ‘spirit of solidarity’ with the tragic status of the potentially free but actually unfree subject of modernity. (shrink)

One of the many sets of distinctions made by Hannah Arendt was that between the world and the earth. I give two different interpretations of this distinction then set out four different ways in which nature matters to us, depending on whether nature is regarded as world or as earth, and whether humans are seen as biological beings or as beings who create and inhabit a world. These different ways are represented in different forms of environmentalism and theories of environmental (...) ethics. The controversy over wind farms in the UK as an instance in which two of the different ways that nature matters come into conflict with each other. (shrink)

This article develops some conceptual correlations between Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment and the common law tradition of legal judgment. The article argues that legal judgment, like aesthetic judgment, is best conceived in terms of intersubjective validity rather than objective truth. Understanding the parallel between aesthetic and legal judgment allows us to appreciate better the relationship between subjectivity and intersubjectivity, the individual and the community, in the formulation and communication of judgments, which combine a personal response and a reasoned determination (...) intended for a discrete audience. The article frames and pursues these themes in relation to four core concepts in Kant’s aesthetic theory: judgment, communication, community, and disinterestedness. Through sustained comparison and application of these concepts in aesthetic judgment and legal judgment, the article provides a conception of judging that more accurately captures the common law role and relationship of the individual judge and the institutional judiciary as integral parts of the broader legal and political community. (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)

It is often claimed that social media accelerate political extremism by employing personalization algorithms that filter users into groups with homogenous beliefs. While an intuitive position, recent research has shown that social media users exhibit self-filtering tendencies. In this paper, I apply Hannah Arendt’s theory of political judgment to hypothesize a cause for self-filtering on social media. According to Arendt, a crucial step in political judgment is the imagination of a general standpoint of distinct yet equal perspectives, against which individuals (...) compare their own judgments in order to test their defensibility. I argue that social media inhibit this step by gamifying the pursuit of social status, which encourages users to consider the perspectives of others not for the sake of a general standpoint but for the sake of improving their social status, resulting in self-filtering. Consequently, ameliorating political extremism on social media requires not just reforming the algorithms that deliver content to users, but the interfaces on which users present their social identities. (shrink)

Narratives of hope are omnipresent in democratic life, but what can they tell us about the structure and orientation of politics? While common, they are often reduced to an all-compassing understanding that overlooks hope's various forms and implications. Democratic theory, however, lacks the theoretical language to attend to these distinctions. The aim of this essay is thus to define a collective and political account of hope and recover the normative basis of a democratic theory of hope. Drawing on the literature (...) on hope and juxtaposing it with extracts from Harvey Milk's ‘The Hope Speech,’ I first distinguish its collective experience before turning to Hannah Arendt. While Arendt rejects a politics of hope that turns away from the world, exploring how she thinks with and against hope provides a theoretically fruitful approach that elevates the in-betweenness of its worldly expression. From that standpoint, I relate the work and experience of hoping with others to her notions of natality, action and promises. These three conceptual touchstones provide the normative basis of a democratic theory of hope and help situate a collective sense of possibility inherent in democratic politics. (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)

According to Gilbert Ryle, improvisation is a basic feature of ordinary action. In this paper, we take this idea seriously. Action is improvisation, in that it is situated: It is shaped by attentive responses to environmental circumstances. This is a crucial aspect of agency. However, it is neglected by causal theories of action (Bratman; Mele) and only partially addressed by Thompson’s process-oriented theory. By resorting to Kant’s theory of judgment, we argue for understanding action performance in terms of improvisational shaping (...) of action in situ. The focus on improvisation points to a situated kind of practical rationality entailing the reciprocal shaping of intention and action instead of the ordinary instrumental kind of rationality of action as unidirectionally determined by intention. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 3, Page 333-360, March 2022. Kant’s writings on political philosophy do not clearly and conclusively determine its place and significance in his critical philosophy. To address this issue, most accounts of Kant’s political philosophy concentrate on his explicitly political texts that cluster around the second and third Critiques. Although many of these interpretations illuminate different aspects of Kant’s political philosophy, they are silent with regard to a concept of publicness that is implied in (...) the first Critique. This article suggests that Kant’s critical method of metaphysics implies a disciplinary conception of publicness, which is foundational for his political philosophy. It demonstrates how this conception of publicness can be found in the Doctrine of Method of the first Critique, more specifically, in Kant’s argument that all acts of reason must be subjected to the discipline of pure reason. (shrink)

This article turns to Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem in order to illustrate the difficulties involved in approaching the (formerly) metaphysical concept of evil as a secular phenomenon. It asks how the advocate of plurality, natality and forgiveness could also vouch for the death sentence of Eichmann based on a rhetoric of retribution and revenge. It then shows that Arendt's surprisingly consistent view of evil is based on a quasi-ontological understanding of the human condition that allowed her to negate Eichmann's (...) humanity. Rather than simply unmasking a metaphysical account in disguise, however, the article develops an alternative perspective that emerges from the conversation between Arendt and Jaspers. It argues that Jaspers's interpretation of Kant offers a way to defend the idea of secular evil and judge Eichmann on the basis of his thoughtlessness. (shrink)