This paper examines Hannah Arendt’s reception of the Aristotelian philía. First, we expose the notes of the philía in his Nicomachean Ethics and the political projection of friendship as synaísthesis. Secondly, we argue that in a relevant fragment of “Truth and Politics” and in Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Arendt finishes clarifying her notion of friendship as a political and worldly bond. There she does not allude to Aristotle, but to Kant and his reflections on the sense of taste.

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)