The Experiential Ontology Of Hannah Arendt

In The Experiential Ontology of Hannah Arendt, Kim Maslin examines Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy through a Heideggerian framework. Maslin argues that not only did Arendt grew beyond the role of naïve and beguiled student, but she became one of Heidegger’s most astute critics. Well acquainted with and deeply respectful of his contributions to existential philosophy, Arendt viewed Heidegger’s work as both profoundly insightful and extraordinarily myopic. Not contented to simply offer a critique of her mentor’s work, Arendt engaged in a lifelong struggle to come to terms with the collective implications of fundamental ontology. Maslin argues that Arendt shifted to political philosophy less to escape her own disappointment at Heidegger’s personal betrayal, but rather as an attempt to right the collective flaws of fundamental ontology. Her project offers a politically responsive, hence responsible, modification of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. She suggests that Heidegger’s allegedly descriptive and non-normative insight into the nature of being is necessarily incomplete, and potentially irresponsible, unless it is undertaken in a manner which is mindful of the collective implications. As such, Maslin shows how Arendt attempts to construct an experiential ontology that transforms Heidegger’s fundamental ontology for use in the public sphere.

Philosophy typically ignores biographical, historical, and cultural aspects of theoriss’ lives in an attempt to take a supposedly abstract and objective view of their work. This book makes some new conclusions about Arendt’s theory by emphasizing how her experience of the world as displayed in her archival materials impacted her thought. Some aspects of Arendt’s life have been examined in detail before, including the fact she was stateless as well as her affair with Heidegger. Instead, this work explores different topics including the biographical and narrative moments of Arendt's own work, the role of archiving in her thought, pivotal events that have not been archived, her understanding of her own identities, and how it affected the role of identity politics in her work. Typically, group action is underemphasized in Arendt scholarship in comparison to individual action and often identity politics questions are considered to lie within the realm of the private. Although Arendt’s theory is problematic when discussing issues concerning identity politics, she did think identity politics could be public and political and that effective political actions may occur within groups. What makes this project unique are the innovative conclusions made by moving the archival and biographical evidence to the center in order to understand her theory more accurately and within its historical and cultural context. This volume will be of interest to professional scholars in Arendt’s work, but also to those who have a more general interest in her life and theory.

The tragedy of totalitarianism, one of the most important turns in the modern philosophy and history of the West undergirds the intellectual relationship between Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt. The rise of totalitarianism caused the disruption of traditional metaphysical and political categories and the necessity of a painstaking forging of new languages for the description of reality. This book argues that Arendt’s answer to Heidegger’s philosophy, intelligible only within the wider context of both thinkers’ struggles with the philosophical tradition of the West, also opens up a new horizon of conceptualizing the relationship between philosophy and education. Paulina Sosnowska develops Arendt's thesis of the broken thread of tradition and situates it in the wider context of Heideggerian philosophy and his entanglement with Nazism, and consequently, questions the traditional relationship between philosophy and education. The final parts of this book return to the problem of dialogue between philosophy, thinking, and university education in times when the political and ethical framework is no longer determined by the continuity of tradition, but the caesura of twentieth-century totalitarianism.

Winner of the 2018 Edwin Ballard Prize awarded by the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology This book develops a unique phenomenology of plurality by introducing Hannah Arendt’s work into current debates taking place in the phenomenological tradition. Loidolt offers a systematic treatment of plurality that unites the fields of phenomenology, political theory, social ontology, and Arendt studies to offer new perspectives on key concepts such as intersubjectivity, selfhood, personhood, sociality, community, and conceptions of the "we." Phenomenology of Plurality is an in-depth, phenomenological analysis of Arendt that represents a viable third way between the "modernist" and "postmodernist" camps in Arendt scholarship. It also introduces a number of political and ethical insights that can be drawn from a phenomenology of plurality. This book will appeal to scholars interested in the topics of plurality and intersubjectivity within phenomenology, existentialism, political philosophy, ethics, and feminist philosophy.

This bold and persuasive study rereads the works of Hannah Arendt to recuperate her relevance to contemporary politics and to show that her deepest concerns are oriented by her ontology. Kimberley Curtis interprets Arendt's earlier work through the lenses of The Life of the Mind, elucidating what Curtis calls an "aesthetic sensibility of tragic pleasure" as a way out of the enclave politics of late modernity.Arguing that oblivion and radical forgetfulness of others are among the most ethically troubling features of our political landscape, Curtis shows that Arendt's aesthetic account of politics offers us an idiom in which to name and resist the depravations and dangers of our political condition. Curtis also elucidates Arendt's debt to phenomenology and argues that our sense of reality is born through highly charged sensuous provocation and mutual responsiveness. Arendt's innovation is to recognize that this countenancing of others is an aesthetic experience that creates the political world.Curtis plumbs the relevance of this work in current issues such as gated communities for the privileged and prisons for the disenfranchised, and in the extraordinary relationship between a black civil rights leader and a Ku Klux Klan officer. Our Sense of the Real is a poetic invocation of Arendt's politics, at once lively, passionate, and crucial.

Hannah Arendt and the History of Thought, edited by Daniel Brennan and Marguerite La Caze, enrichens and deepens scholarship on Arendt’s relation to philosophical history and traditions. Some contributors analyze thinkers not often linked to Arendt, such as William Shakespeare, Hans Jonas, and Simone de Beauvoir. Other contributors treat themes that are pressing and crucial to understanding Arendt’s work, such as love in its many forms, ethnicity and race, disability, human rights, politics, and statelessness. The collection is anchored by chapters on Arendt’s interpretation of Kant and her relation to early German Romanticism and phenomenology, while other chapters explore new perspectives, such as Arendt and film, her philosophical connections with other women thinkers, and her influence on Eastern European thought and activism. The collection expands the frames of reference for research on Arendt—both in terms of using a broader range of texts like her Denktagebuch and in examining her ideas about judgment, feminism, and worldliness in this wider context.

Kristeva explores the philosophical aspects of Hannah Arendt's work: her understanding of such concepts as language, self, body, political space, and life.