Quote of the Weeks
Featured Article
Hannah Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy
In the Fall of 1970, Hannah Arendt delivered a series of lectures on Kant’s political philosophy. She was scheduled to teach Kant again in the spring of 1976, though her death in December 1975 prevented her from doing so. Indeed, the fact of her untimely death is central to the story of Arendt’s Kant lectures – both their origin and the scholarly attention given to them. Being lecture notes, they were, of course, not published – nor were they ever intended for publication. Relegated to a cardboard box and stored in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., they became the interest of a then-graduate student, Ronald Beiner, who sought to read them for the purposes of his dissertation research.10-31-2024
Quote of the Weeks
What Happens When We Theorists Cease to Believe in What We Are Doing
This Arendt-Bay exchange has stayed with me throughout my intellectual career. It’s more and more the case that academics are committed to the view that intellectual activity is justified by “engagement” in the sense of helping to solve the world’s problems. They are less and less committed to the life of the mind as something that is self-justifying, as something that is humanly essential whether or not it’s successful in addressing “modern problems.” The instrumentalist view embraced by Bay has continually gained ground; the non- or anti-instrumentalist view defended by Arendt has steadily lost ground. If the implications for “this whole discipline” (philosophy and social and political theory) looked worrisome in 1972, they look positively dire in 2024.07-02-2024
Hannah Arendt and The Poetics of “The Pursuit of Happiness”
Clifford Brooks“The pursuit of happiness” must be the most poetic phrase in the Constitution. Of course, the language throughout is elegant, the “felicity of pen” of Thomas Jefferson. However, his way about the pursuit of happiness grabs me by the heartstrings. No doubt this term lifted from Kant’s, “life, liberty, and property’ drew Arendt’s attention.
09-08-2020
On the publication of the anthology “Denkräume”:
Hannah Arendt’s spaces of thinking and on ours today
Jana Marlene MaderIn “The Life of the Mind”, Hannah Arendt argues that thinking is a rebellion against the tyranny of time and a safeguard against the terror of our own finiteness. She notes that cognition removes us from the present while pondering where the thinking ego is located:
09-03-2020
On the Banality of Not Bearing Witness
By Samuel R. GallowayOn May 5, 2020, anonymously leaked video brought the lynching of Ahmaud Arbery in Glynn County, Georgia into the light of the public realm. It is devastating footage and I was overwhelmed when I truly comprehended what I was witnessing. As I did, I cried out of grief, shame, and anger. I looked to my husband and confessed, “I did not want to see this.” But, the fact is I did not see much, even if what I had witnessed was just enough to understand...
05-22-2020
Woman as Witness, Beginner, Philosopher
By Jana Schmidt
In “Regarding the Cave” the Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero offers a reading of Plato’s allegory of the cave that expands on an interpretation of that same narrative by Hannah Arendt. Cavarero is perhaps the first to notice how Arendt’s remarks in “Tradition and the Modern Age,” “What is Authority?,” and The Human Condition connect, how together they form a spirited critique of Western philosophy, and...
02-21-2020
Power, Arrest, Dispersal
By Patchen MarkellTo read this line from The Human Condition in the wake of the demonstrations in Tahrir Square, or in the midst of the Occupations that have radiated from Zuccotti Park across the United States and beyond, might be invigorating: aren’t both of these events expressions of power in Arendt’s sense, instances of the unpredictable human capacity to break out of the daily mire of authoritarianism or of capitalism and, acting in concert, to begin something new?
01-31-2020
Reading Arendt in the Era of #MeToo
By Kate BerminghamMore often than I would like, my work on Hannah Arendt and my work as a feminist theorist and activist seem to pull in different directions. I sometimes find myself frustrated not only by Arendt’s relative silence on questions of gender and her occasional sexist remarks (among other things, she once remarked that it was unbecoming for women to occupy positions of authority), but also, like many feminist readers before me...
01-29-2020
Hannah Arendt and World War I: On statelessness and the rise of totalitarian regimes
By Jana Marlene MaderBehind this narrative of the “dangerous migrant” is a disinformation machine that cultivates the powerful climate of anti-immigration. Unlike the scenario 100 years ago, when nationalism was closely linked to the trial of strength between great powers, we can see a trend that is an irony in itself: the globalisation of nationalism. The target audience in this scenario is the “dissatisfied” citizen..
01-03-2020
Everything is Fragile: Reading Arendt in the Anthropocene
John D. Macready, professor of philosophy at Collin College, offers this week's Quote of the Week.This essay was originally published in Amor Mundi on July 18, 2019.
01-02-2020