Hannah Arendt Center and German Studies Program present:
Hannah Arendt, Unknown: Symposium
Friday, February 21, 2025
Olin Humanities, Room 204
9:30 am – 5:30 pm
This event occurred on:
A one-day conference on The Critical Hannah Arendt Edition and The Life of the Mind.
The Critical Edition of Hannah Arendt’s Complete Works presents a vital new view of this eminent political thinker. For the first time, all of Hannah Arendt’s published and unpublished works are being made available in a philologically reliable scholarly edition with critical commentary. Two additional features make this edition distinct: Arendt wrote and published nearly all of her books and essays in English and in German; this fundamental multilingualism can now be fully taken into account by future Arendt scholarship. Further, the Critical Edition is designed as an innovative hybrid project, appearing both in print as books and in an open access web portal enabling new technologically supported textual analyses. Over two days of celebration, presentation, and discussion, the audience will be invited to learn about the new edition, to consider the place of editorial scholarship in academic and intellectual life, and to discover together this unknown Arendt.
The Life of the Mind was Hannah Arendt’s unfinished final work. In it, she focuses on three basic mental activities—thinking, willing, and judging—and their relation to the world of appearances and to the human capacity for moral and political action. The new critical edition makes available in print, for the first time, the text of the typescripts as Arendt left them, complemented by a wealth of previously unpublished material, detailed annotations, and extensive scholarly commentary. In this symposium, the editors will introduce this groundbreaking edition, offer three points of entry into the material, and invite the audience to join in a wide-ranging discussion about The Life of the Mind and its urgent contemporary import.
Open to the public.
The Critical Edition of Hannah Arendt’s Complete Works presents a vital new view of this eminent political thinker. For the first time, all of Hannah Arendt’s published and unpublished works are being made available in a philologically reliable scholarly edition with critical commentary. Two additional features make this edition distinct: Arendt wrote and published nearly all of her books and essays in English and in German; this fundamental multilingualism can now be fully taken into account by future Arendt scholarship. Further, the Critical Edition is designed as an innovative hybrid project, appearing both in print as books and in an open access web portal enabling new technologically supported textual analyses. Over two days of celebration, presentation, and discussion, the audience will be invited to learn about the new edition, to consider the place of editorial scholarship in academic and intellectual life, and to discover together this unknown Arendt.
The Life of the Mind was Hannah Arendt’s unfinished final work. In it, she focuses on three basic mental activities—thinking, willing, and judging—and their relation to the world of appearances and to the human capacity for moral and political action. The new critical edition makes available in print, for the first time, the text of the typescripts as Arendt left them, complemented by a wealth of previously unpublished material, detailed annotations, and extensive scholarly commentary. In this symposium, the editors will introduce this groundbreaking edition, offer three points of entry into the material, and invite the audience to join in a wide-ranging discussion about The Life of the Mind and its urgent contemporary import.
Open to the public.