Fourteen contributions from international academics examine the themes of judgment, imagination, and politics in the philosophy of Hannah Arendt and Immanuel Kant. In the introduction, Beiner and Nedelsky (both political science, U. of Toronto) discuss the problem of political judgment and the recognition of subjectivity. Other topics include the challenges of diversity to the law, the public use of reason, and Arendt's lectures on Kant. c. Book News Inc.

Immanuel Kant, in ‘What is Orientation in Thinking?’ focuses on reason as the touchstone for speculative thought. The question of how to orient ourselves in thinking is still pressing, particularly if one does not take reason as providing principles for judgment. Hannah Arendt and Michèle Le Dœuff focus on this problem of orientation from a practical point of view and build up a compelling picture of how we can orient our thought. Both take imagination to be central to (...) good judgment, in addition to critical rationality. The project of enriching our imaginary and improving our judgments is an essential one in both ethics and politics, since imagination can either enable creative changes in our thinking or be stymied by pernicious myths. Arendt’s writings offer an account of the significance of the imagination to reliable judgment and suggest ways to avoid the extremes of arrogance and diffidence. Furthermore, Le Dœuff argues in recent work that we should challenge a range of myths in the epistemic imaginary and chart a course that involves hope for the future. I consider how it is possible to enrich the imaginary to overcome damaging myths, on Le Dœuff’s account, by taking political questions, particularly feminist ones, as reference points and also by avoiding the opposites of lack of faith in one’s own judgement and over-confidence. (shrink)

This paper offers a restatement of the basic project of Hannah Arendt's Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, tries to trace its theoretical motivation, and presents some criticisms of Arendt's interpretation of Kant's Critique of Judgment. Arendt's political philosophy as a whole is an attempt to ground the idea of human dignity on the publicly displayed 'words and deeds' that con stitute the realm of human affairs. This project involves a philo sophical response both to Plato's impugning of (...) the dignity of the polis and to Hegel's founding of modern historicism. The Kant Lectures bring this philosophical project to its completion because the enact ment of public deeds presupposes a company of judging spectators who draw meaning from the spectacle by judging and appreciating what is enacted. But this conception, precisely because it relates so deeply to Arendt's own theoretical impulse, leads to a sometimes onesided and misleading reading of Kant. Key Words: aesthetic judgment • dialogue/communication • Hannah Arendt • Immanuel Kant • political judgment. (shrink)

In my paper, I try to summarize Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the method of political thinking, following them through their genesis. My fundamental assumption is that although she had been preoccupied with the issue before (at least from 1957), she became more seriously interested in it after the controversy following the publication of the Eichmann volume. It is generally known that Arendt believed to have found the pattern for the method of political thinking in Kant’s third critique, (...) the one about judgment; more precisely in the Kantian description of the reflective judgment. This served as a pattern for Arendt for what she sometimes called representative thinking or opinion. If, on the other hand, we examine Arendt’s referring thoughts in their genesis we also come to realize why that was the case. In my opinion, Arendt looked in Kant’s work for a form of political thinking that remained impartial, in other words, it was not committed to one political cause or another, yet did not break its relations to politics, remaining entirely political. (shrink)

Part of 'Works of Philosophy and Their Reception' series / -/- Contributors include: Ronald Beiner, Linda Zerilli, D.N. Rodowick, Cecilia Sjöholm, Martin Blumenthal-Barby, Helga Varden, Roger Berkowitz.

This essay aims to analyze Arendt’s reflections on the activity of thinking. This activity is essential to understanding our present and reconciling ourselves with contingency and human fragility. Unlike the philosophical tradition that has vindicated contemplative thinking, Arendt recovers the lost treasure of reflective thinking through the portraits of thinkers, such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Walter Benjamin, Socrates, Immanuel Kant, and Franz Kafka. In dark times, when the public sphere is destroyed, the challenge of “thinking without banisters” implies an (...) act of political resistance, by trying to examine the devastating reality, even if the answers are not what we would like to see and hear. Through reflective thinking, we can open up to the world and the drama of human freedom with its heterogeneities and destructive leaks. (shrink)

H. Arendt developed largely her hermeneutical interpretation of understanding in line with the rethinking of I. Kant’s philosophical heritage. Although she was able to offer a rather original interpretation of the theoretical views of the great German philosopher, her hermeneutic strategy was also influenced by the approaches to their understanding that were proposed by her teachers M. Heidegger and K. Jaspers. Arendt’s hermeneutical teaching proceeds from the need to realize the close unity of practical action and spiritual activity of the (...) human subject - Vita Activa and Vita Contemplativa. Accepting the initial position of Heidegger’s metaphysics of finiteness about the “abandonment” of man in the flow of time, Arendt simultaneously follows Jaspers’ call for the need for an existential-hermeneutic interpretation of practical action and the abilities of the spirit by their understanding on the basis of Kant’s legacy. Singling out thinking, will and judgement among the main vectors of self-realization of the spirit, she demonstrates their close relationship with the main types of practical human activity - work, work and action. Analyzing the abilities of the spirit, Arendt emphasizes the major role of thinking, which brings together the processes of knowledge acquisition and meaning creation. It highlights the primacy of the meaning-producing function of the reason in relation to the ability of the intellect to generate true knowledge on the basis of generalization of the data of contemplation. Describing thinking after Kant as a “thing in itself”, Arendt speaks of its involvement in eternity and time in the moment of the present, the ability to generalize the past and design the future. Thinking forms the core of practical reason, which Kant identified with the will, and opens a new horizon of meaning generation in its aspiration to the future. The ability to judge also turns out to be a product of thinking, referring to the past while relying on common sense and imagination. Arendt rightly argues that the “paralysis” of the faculty of judgement, indicating the significance of Kant’s categorical imperative, threatens not only to produce a distorted vision of history, but also the triumph of the “banality of evil” in the sphere of politics. (shrink)

In this paper, I am arguing for hermeneutic responsibility in political judgment, as it can be attributed to Arendt’s work. Political judgment is reflective judgment relying on representation by imagination and therefore only has exemplary validity. Along the line of Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, I point out her argument for a different generality in politics than the generality of concepts. This generality of political judgment always refers back to the particular. Only by this reference (...) to the particular, namely to facts and situations of direct interaction, can the spectator, who undertakes the political judgment, create the public realm where action takes place. However, this task attributed to the spectator also implies the task of reshaping the public realm. These acts of giving an account of and reconsidering all over again facts handed over by narration and testimony imply the hermeneutic responsibility to unceasingly retrieve factual truth which is rooted in direct interaction. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt disavowed the title of “philosopher,” and is known above all as a political theorist. But the relationship between philosophy and politics animates her entire oeuvre. We find her addressing the topic in The Human Condition (1958), in Between Past and Future (a collection of essays written in the early 1960s), and in Men in Dark Times (another collection of essays, this one from the late sixties). It is treated in her Lectures on Kant’s Political (...) Philosophy, composed during the seventies, and also in the posthumous Life of the Mind, two of three projected volumes of which were complete when she died in 1975. Certainly, Arendt’s thought cannot be understood without taking into account her deep suspicion of and equally deep commitment to philosophy in the context of political reflection. For all that, her writings on this abiding preoccupation do not gel into a systematically articulated theory or programmatic statement. Instead, they reflect Arendt’s appreciation of what remained for her a “vital tension” – an enigma. (shrink)

In the literature on Hannah Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, two sorts of claim have been made by different interpreters. First, there is Beiner’s observation that there is a shift in Arendt’s thoughts on judgment, which has led to the idea that Arendt develops two distinct theories of judgment. The second sort of claim concerns Arendt’s use of Kant’s transcendental principles. At its core, it has led to the critique that Arendt detranscendentalizes — or empiricalizes — Kant, (...) by linking Kant’s judgments of taste to an empirical sociability. In this article, I argue against both of these claims. Early fragments of Arendt’s on judgment make clear that she develops only one theory of judgment. It is only that it is not until later in her life that she fully elaborates it. Nor does Arendt confuse Kant’s idea of enlarged thinking with an actual dialogue with others. In fact, Arendt introduces an interesting interdependence between judgment and speech, or communication. I develop my argument by first outlining the problems Arendt hoped to resolve via judgment. Through my reading of the Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, I show how Arendt interprets Kant’s Critique of Judgment not as his theory of aesthetic judgments, but as an answer to the more general question ‘How do I judge?’ I also clarify the difference Arendt draws between common sense and community sense. With community sense, Arendt uncovers a foundation not only for men as political beings but also for the idea of humanity. This finding is often overlooked in the literature. I conclude with another Arendtian distinction that is often overlooked, that between spectators and the solitary philosopher. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 30.2 (2000) 25-42 [Access article in PDF] What is Political Feeling? Bernadette Meyler Anthony Cascardi. Consequences of Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,1999. As disaffection with poststructuralism increases, but new paradigms have not yet emerged, theorists have begun to reconsider the ties that current thought maintains with the tradition it critiques, in particular, its affiliations with the Enlightenment. Focus has inevitably fallen on the writings of Immanuel Kant, (...) which in the act of codifying Enlightenment rationality simultaneously initiated its dissolution. Disputes tend to arise, however, over the precise nature and cause of the hairline fracture that prevents Kant's Critiques from attaining the unity to which they aspire. Even greater controversy centers on the advisability of possible responses: should we set the bones, break open the gap, or provide an entirely new limb? In Consequences of Enlightenment, Anthony Cascardi undertakes a detailed discussion of how various theoretical schools interpret the fissure, and the problems posed by their accounts. Not simply remaining content with this critique of critiques, Cascardi presents his own stance, advising that we embrace Kant's recourse to "feeling" in the Critique of Judgment as an inevitable entailment of the Kantian system. Whereas Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment argues that the opposition between Kantian reason and Nietzschean irrationalism represents the undoing of the Enlightenment, Cascardi responds that Kant's own writings encompass the duality. As an essential moment of what he terms the Enlightenment's "aesthetic critique," the resistance that feeling poses to "the unity of experience"--or to the unity of the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason--should be embraced. Cascardi further maintains that this "should" entails political consequences, although his text does not itself fully elaborate a vision of what these might be.The fact that such a rich suggestion remains relatively undeveloped is perhaps inevitable in a book of such comprehensive scope. Consequences of Enlightenment is a text that seems to call the reader to the task of continuing the multiple projects that Cascardi has initiated. I will attempt to articulate what those endeavors might be, and to propose points in his work upon which future inquiry could be focused. Because Cascardi's goals are two-pronged--to examine twentieth-century thinkers' Kantian inheritance and to engage directly with the "aesthetic critique" of Kant--it is sometimes difficult to ascertain whether Consequences of Enlightenment attributes certain positions to Kant or to his interpreters. Although this difference might not seem significant given Cascardi's claims about the persistence of Kantian aporias in the work of his inheritors, returning to Kant may allow us to ask how we should proceed in developing the political potentials of aesthetic critique. Two principal questions arise in this regard. The first inquires whether and how one can think aesthetics with politics; in other words, [End Page 25] what is political feeling? The second question provides a more limited point of entry into the same problem by focusing on the Critique of Judgment itself; what politics are entailed respectively by the beautiful and the sublime?Cascardi discusses the Kantian sublime only twice in detail during the course of Consequences of Enlightenment, once in chapter 4, "Communication and Transformation: Aesthetics and Politics in Habermas and Arendt," and for the second time, and most provocatively, in chapter 7, "Feeling and/as Force." In treating Hannah Arendt, who, in her 1970 Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, attempted to derive a Kantian account of the political from the Critique of Judgment, Cascardi explains that she tried to complete the Enlightenment by erroneously "turning from the indeterminacy of the aesthetic in Kant to a politics that designates democratic community as its field or object-domain"; he then asserts that, "Specifically, the politics that Arendt would claim to derive from Kant's aesthetics is a democratic politics of the beautiful..." [156]. Subsequently elaborating on the reasons that Arendt overemphasized the beautiful, seemingly at the expense of the sublime, Cascardi writes, "Arendt's tendency to privilege the beautiful over the sublime must be seen as part of her larger effort to construct a rational politics. For this effort, she takes... (shrink)

In this article I take into examination Hannah Arendt’s original and influential “appropriation” of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, providing both a reconstruction and a critical interpretation of it. In the first section I basically contextualize Arendt’s interest in this topic by showing that it is connected to her more general concern with the wider and more comprehensive question of the crisis of Western civilization. Then, in the second and third sections of my article, I (...) offer an overview of Arendt’s conception of the crisis in culture and politics in the present age, and explain how this gradually led her to develop an original interpretation of Kant’s concept of Aesthetic Judgment in terms of a new and somehow unprecedented form of Political Judgment. The fourth section is dedicated to a brief excursus on Kant’s own treatment of the concept of Urteilskraft in some of his main works and some of his letters, in order to show that this concept for Kant has a broader and more complex meaning than one is sometimes used to think. Finally, in the fifth section I first focus on a few problematic aspects of Arendt’s “creative”, i.e. sometimes philologically inadequate, use of Kant’s concept of Aesthetic Judgment understood as a kind of Political Judgment, but then add that from a strictly philosophical point of view this interpretation has proved to be a very stimulating and enriching one, as testified by the fact that in the last decades it has produced a veritable Wirkungsgeschichte and has helped to develop the so-called “Paradigm of Judgment” in ethics and political philosophy. (shrink)

Many contemporaries criticized him for smashing the Age of Reason. Goethe, however, remarked that reading a page of Immanuel Kant was like entering a bright and well-lighted room: The great eighteenth-century philosopher illuminated everything he ever pondered. The twelve essays in this volume reveal Kant's towering importance as an ethical and social thinker as well as his enduring influence on the shape of philosophy. Included are excerpts from Dreams of a Visionary, Prolegomena to Every Future Metaphysics, Metaphysical Foundations (...) of Morals, Critique of Judgement , and Eternal Peace . As Professor Friedrich writes in his introduction to this volume: "The problem of freedom, the freedom of the human personality to unfold and fulfill its higher destiny, is the central issue of all of Kant's philosophizing.". (shrink)

If we understand Arendt’s work on totalitarianism as the beginning of her philosophizing, then we can better appreciate her concern with human nature and better judge her Existenz philosophy. Certifying Arendt as an existentialist allows those who would label her to recast her ideas into the language of modernity and thereby abolish the nature that stalks modem theorizing. Eliminating nature as a reckoning also obliterates history as an anchor and offers modems unlimited will for shaping the future. But Arendt (...) is decisively anti-modem in her formulation ofImagination, which she uses to connect men to the past, to the deeds and the speech that set limits to human action. Imagination allows her to break through the thought-systems that now substitute for a God who is no-more and for a rationalist potential that is not-yet. This in-between forms a space of existence for thinkers who want to be at home in the world. (shrink)

Many of Hannah Arendt's readers argue that differences between her earlier and later work on judgment are significant enough to constitute an actual break or rupture. Of Arendt's completed works, the 'Postscriptum' to Thinking , the first volume of The Life of the Mind , and her Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy are widely considered to be her definitive remarks on judgment. These texts are privileged for two primary reasons. First, they were written after Arendt's controversial text, Eichmann (...) in Jerusalem . It was Arendt's recognition of the role that Eichmann's inability to think played in his war crimes which motivated her to analyse more fully not only the 'mental activity' of thinking, but those of willing, and judging as well. Second, in The Life of the Mind and the Kant Lectures , Arendt treats judgment as a distinct mental activity; in her earlier work judgment is connected to both politics and thought. In this essay I argue that while Arendt does indeed reformulate her notion of judgment, she does not depoliticize it. I begin by calling into question Ronald Beiner's claim that Arendt's later work on judgment can stand in for the unwritten third volume of The Life of the Mind . I then consider two more specific claims, the first of which is that judgment is relevant only in 'rare' times of 'crisis'. I argue that a crisis as Arendt understands it is not necessarily and merely a 'rare' and short-lived phenomenon. The effects of what Arendt refers to as 'dark times' are long-term and pervasive and, moreover, the function of making judgments within such an expanded context is politically germane. Second, I problematize the idea that conceiving of judgment as a distinct mental faculty necessarily disconnects it from politics. I examine the nature of Arendt's relationship to Kant and argue that she appropriates and reconceptualizes his work in such a way that judgment, while a distinct faculty, nonetheless retains its political relevance. I conclude by suggesting that the impulse to systematize Arendt's unsystematic treatment of judgment ought to be resisted. (shrink)

The present volume brings Arendt's notes for these lectures together with other of her texts on the topic of judging and provides important clues to the likely direction of Arendt's thinking in this area.

This book analyzes Hannah Arendt's later thought, putting it in dialogue with her other writings and notes on Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment to outline Arendt's theory of judgment for the twentieth century.

Hannah Arendt's last philosophical work was an intended three-part project entitled _The Life of the Mind_. Unfortunately, Arendt lived to complete only the first two parts, _Thinking_ and _Willing_. Of the third, _Judging_, only the title page, with epigraphs from Cato and Goethe, was found after her death. As the titles suggest, Arendt conceived of her work as roughly parallel to the three _Critiques_ of Immanuel Kant. In fact, while she began work on _The Life of the Mind_, (...) Arendt lectured on "Kant's Political Philosophy," using the_ Critique of Judgment_ as her main text. The present volume brings Arendt's notes for these lectures together with other of her texts on the topic of judging and provides important clues to the likely direction of Arendt's thinking in this area. (shrink)

Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy is the go-to text for readers interested in Hannah Arendt’s theory of judgment. Arendt’s discussion of Kantian aesthetic judgments of taste is typically associated with her own view. However, readers who find her interpretation idiosyncratic, if not wrongheaded, distinguish the author of the Critique of Judgment from Arendt’s Kant. Rather than debate who got Kant ‘right’, this essay explores what Arendt discovered about judging politically by reading Kant in her own Arendtian way. Judgment (...) was present early in her political thinking, for judgment deals with the particular and ‘the problem of the new’. As such, judgment concerns the realm of human affairs that the Western philosophical tradition has found unworthy of serious study due to its ever-changing and contingent nature. Beholden to the standards set by philosophy, political thought has been unable to make sense of its subject matter, which is action and ‘men in the plural’. Clarifying what it means to judge politically was crucial to Arendt’s lifelong effort to disentangle politics from philosophy and its focus on ‘Man in the singular’. (shrink)

This book presents an account of Hannah Arendt's performative and non-sovereign theory of freedom and political action, with special focus on action's disclosure of the unique 'who' of each agent. It aims to illuminate Arendt's critique of sovereign rule, totalitarianism, and world-alienation, her defense of a distinct political sphere for engaged citizen action and judgment, her conception of the 'right to have rights,' and her rejection of teleological philosophies of history. Arendt proposes that in modern, pluralistic, secular (...) public spheres, no one metaphysical or religious idea can authoritatively validate political actions or opinions absolutely. At the same time, she sees action and thinking as revealing an inescapable existential illusion of a divine element in human beings, a notion represented well by the 'daimon' metaphor that appears in Arendt's own work and in key works by Plato, Heidegger, Jaspers, and Kant, with which she engages. While providing a post-metaphysical theory of action and judgment, Arendt performs the fact that many of the legitimating concepts of contemporary secular politics retain a residual vocabulary of transcendence. This book will be of interest not only to Arendt scholars, but also to students of identity politics, the critique of sovereignty, international political theory, political theology, and the philosophy of history.. (shrink)

My aim in this article is to understand the role of imagination and practical judgment in Kant's moral philosophy. After a comparison of Kant with Rousseau, I explore Kant's moral philosophy itself — unlike Hannah Arendt, who finds in the enlarged mentality of the third Critique the ground for the activity of imagination in a shared world. Instead, I place the concept of moral legislation in its background, the reflection on particulars relevant to deliberation, and discuss the mutual relation (...) of reflection and determination. Not only reflection and determination work together; imagination and judgment imply one another essentially, as interpretation of what is relevant, and as a principle of orientation in the choice of the maxim against the backdrop of a uniform and ordered world. The concepts of analogy and symbolic exhibition turn out to be crucial for how reason represents to itself the reality of ideas in the world. (shrink)

This book argues that moral philosophy should be based on seven scientific principles of theory selection. It then argues that a new moral theory—Rightness as Fairness—satisfies those principles more successfully than existing theories. Chapter 1 explicates the seven principles of theory-selection, arguing that moral philosophy must conform to them to be truth-apt. Chapter 2 argues those principles jointly support founding moral philosophy in known facts of empirical moral psychology: specifically, our capacities for mental time-travel and modal imagination. Chapter 2 then (...) shows that these capacities present human decisionmakers with a problem of diachronic rationality that includes but generalizes beyond, L.A. Paul’s problem of transformative experience: a problem that I call “the problem of possible future selves.” Chapter 3 then argues that a new principle of rationality—the Categorical-Instrumental Imperative—is the only rational solution to this problem, as it requires our present and future selves to forge and uphold a recursive, bi-directional contract with each another given mutual recognition of the problem. Chapter 4 then shows that the Categorical-Instrumental Imperative has three identical formulations analogous but superior to Immanuel Kant’s various formulations of his ‘categorical imperative.’ Chapter 5 shows that these unified formulas jointly entail a particular test of moral principles: a Moral Original Position similar to John Rawls’ famous ‘original position’, but which avoids a variety of problems with Rawls' model. Chapter 6 then shows that the Moral Original Position generates Four Principles of Fairness, which can then be combined into a single principle of moral rightness: Rightness as Fairness. This new conception of rightness is shown to reconcile four dominant moral frameworks (deontology, consequentialism, virtue ethics, and contractualism), as well as entail a new method of moral decisionmaking for applied ethics: a method of “principled fair negotiation” according to which applied ethical issues cannot be wholly resolved through principled debate, but must instead be resolved by actual negotiation and compromise. This method is then argued to generate novel, nuanced analyses of a variety of applied moral issues, including trolley cases, torture, and the ethical treatment of nonhuman animals. Chapter 7 then shows that Rightness as Fairness reconciles three leading political frameworks—libertarianism, egalitarianism, and communitarianism—showing how all three embody legitimate moral ideals that can, and should, be fairly negotiated against each other to settle the scope, and nature, of domestic, international, and global justice on an ongoing, iterated basis. Finally, Chapter 8 argues that Rightness as Fairness satisfies all seven of the principles of theory-selected defended in Chapter 1 more successfully than rival theories. (shrink)

The Shadow of Totalitarianism develops a new way to think about the problem of evil in politics. Beginning with the commonplace idea that the rise of totalitarianism in the twentieth century marked the emergence of a new form of evil, Javier Burdman finds early seeds of thinking about this form in Immanuel Kant's moral philosophy. Far from being an isolated object of inquiry, evil, Burdman argues, has long shaped and been central to philosophical understandings of political action and (...) judgment. Systematically analyzing the relationship between evil, action, and judgment in the work of Kant, Hannah Arendt, and Jean-François Lyotard, The Shadow of Totalitarianism aligns evil in politics with a desire for moral certainty, hence the emphasis on the need to accept and affirm uncertainty in current ethical theories. The careful philosophical analysis through which Burdman develops this inquiry contributes to a better understanding of some of the theoretical complexities involved in the problem of evil and provides conceptual tools with which to approach it. (shrink)

For Hannah Arendt, creating a durable, civil public world was of utmost importance. Though many have discussed Arendt's relevance to the contemporary work of politics, Eric Gorham is the first to examine her ideas of the "space of appearance" in the context of the university classroom. In The Theater of Politics, Gorham examines in detail Arendt's dramaturgical theory of politics and her method of political criticism and maintains that politics can be observed in the classroom, in which students (...) are future political actors and spectators in training. Using Arendt as a theoretical platform, Gorham offers innovative ideas for politicizing the classroom and for reconceptualizing faculty and student community service: If professors and administrators can imagine their tasks in light of lessons learned from classical theater, then students will benefit from a renewed emphasis on teaching. Gorham moves to redraw the basis of political citizenship, criticizing arguments offered by civic republican and communitarian theorists and crafting a richer, more judicious concept of citizenship—one that can be learned and practiced in the political science classroom in particular and in the university in general. (shrink)

Książka proponuje interpretację filozofii politycznej jednej z bardziej wpływowych współczesnych amerykańskich autorek – Marthy Craven Nussbaum. Praca skupia się na rozwijanej przez filozofkę wersji koncepcji zdolności (capability approach), która jest rozpatrywana w kontekście po- Rawlsowskiego egalitarnego liberalizmu. Biorąc pod uwagę takie zaplecze, książka ma na celu zbadanie warunków możliwości zrealizowania jego podstawowych założeń normatywnych, a więc wartości: wolności, równości i szacunku dla pluralizmu. Zgodnie z proponowaną interpretacją koncepcja Nussbaum ukazuje podstawy egalitarnego liberalizmu w nowym świetle, w tej mierze, w jakiej (...) zwraca uwagę na konieczność uzupełnienia instytucji o odpowiedni model rozumowania praktycznego. Książka wykazuje estetyczność takiej koncepcji, która przejawia się zarówno na poziomie pojęć (podobieństwa między doświadczeniem estetycznym a rozumowaniem praktycznym), jak i na poziomie przykładów (zastosowania sztuki dla kształcenia postaw obywatelskich). W ten sposób zaprezentowane ujęcie wpisuje się w ramy szeroko pojętej estetyki politycznej. Zagadnienia podejmowane w pracy obejmują między innymi następujące kwestie: dyskusja na temat tzw. waluty sprawiedliwości, liberalizm polityczny, psychologia moralna, emocje polityczne, władza sądzenia, związki między etyką a literaturą oraz kształcenie obywatelskie. Oprócz Marthy Nussbaum szczególne znaczenie dla argumentacji mają tacy autorzy, jak Amartya Sen, John Rawls, Charles Larmore, Immanuel Kant, Hannah Arendt, Crispin Sartwell. (shrink)

For a long time, one of the most important tasks for education in liberal democracies has been to foster the next generation in core democratic values in order to prepare them for future political responsibilities. In spite of this, general trust in the liberal democratic system is in rapid decline. In this paper, the tension between the ambitions of liberal-democratic educational systems and contemporary challenges to central democratic ideas is approached by reconsidering Hannah Arendt’s critique of (...) class='Hi'>political education. This will be done informed by her analysis of the tension between the concepts of state and nation. By showing how education, depending on its role as a tool of the state or the nation, may be a fundamental requirement for the establishment of a common world or the most effective tool for its destruction, the paper argues for the need to understand Arendt’s educational thinking in light of her wider political analysis. Rather than downplaying the provocative aspects of her critique, the paper argues for the need to use it as a starting point for thinking again how education may become an emancipatory undertaking capable of disarming contemporary threats to human plurality and freedom. (shrink)

This dissertation evaluates the efforts of modern philosophers of aesthetics and politics to distinguish judgment from both cognition and volition. To see the rule under which any given particular is to be subsumed as a law fabricated and imposed by either God or reason is to characterize free judgment in terms of sovereignty. This generates the skeptical dilemma of an infinite regress of the legitimacy of the rule's application that can only be avoided by seeing the act of judgment as (...) an act of will. Such a voluntarist account of politics and judgment must in the end deny plurality for identity, and efface the categorical Aristotelian distinction between the public and the private. The rejection of the teleology of publicity is thus tied to the collapse of phronesis back into a Platonic techne that strives to produce society and man in the image of the eidos. ;Three "solutions" to this aporia are considered. The first is Hannah Arendt's appropriation for politics of Kant's aesthetic judgment, which allows for categorical distinctions between the public and the private and between judgment and the observance of rules. This project fails on account of the extreme formalism of that aesthetics. The second reads the third Critique as an allegory of politics. This too fails, as Kant's aesthetic community relies upon the productive legislation of the genius, a figure whose lineage reaches back to the half divine, half bestial figure of Machiavelli's founding prince. The third is a direct return to Aristotle. While his ethical philosophy offers us our best account of phronesis and epieikeia, it does not sufficiently engage the motivations for its own rejection. Hobbes, Locke, and Kant were not so taken with the model of mechanistic science that they simply forgot that in their common lives they regularly made judgments without the implicit or explicit guidance of a rule. The modern is better seen as a Weltanschauung, less a description that might be right or wrong than a desire. The alternative to the aporia of judgment is not found in the aesthetic but in a Wittgensteinian form of philosophical therapy. (shrink)

The problem of responsibility to future generations is inherently related to responsibility for the environment. Attempting to provide a new grounding for the figuration of such responsibility, Hans Jonas used Immanuel Kant’s ethics as a paradigm of traditional ethics to provide a critique of their limitations in addressing these issues, and he found three crucial problems in Kant’s ethics. Kant’s philosophy provides enough material for an answer to Jonas by building an account which 1) gives a teleological (...) grounding of responsibility for the environment and consequently responsibility to future generations; 2) enables the establishment of collective responsibility towards the idea of moral progress, which includes future generations; and 3) answers Jonas’s challenge by extending moral concerns to other living and non-living beings and especially to future generations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.1 (2003) 93-101 [Access article in PDF] A Political LifeArendtian Aesthetics and Open Systems Sue Spaid Since the 1990s, artists have broken ground by producing works that are "open systems." That is, they are incomplete, participatory, and elastic. In this paper, I will argue that open systems exemplify Hannah Arendt's conception of vita activa, in contrast to art's traditional role as inspiring vita (...) contemplativa. Since they do not explicitly affirm or refute political policies, such works are generally not considered "political" art. However, they accommodate Arendt's notion of the political life, since they incorporate process, durability, pluralities of spectators, and unpredictability. Furthermore, because they do not resemble what ordinarily passes for art, reflective judgment is required to engage them, and to determine whether they are art.Echoing Diotima's interest in immortality, Arendt links beauty to durability. Open systems are particularly durable because we remember them as a public experiences that include participants and spectators. Such performative and pleasurable worldly actions entail aesthetic engagements that are very much in line with Arendt's description of the political life. Critical Engagement In the sphere of fabrication itself, there is only one kind of object to which the unending chain of means and ends does not apply, and this [End Page 93] is the work of art, the most useless and, at the same time, the most durable thing human hands can produce... It is the reification that occurs in writing something down, painting an image, composing a piece of music, etc. which actually makes the thought a reality; and in order to produce these thought things, which we usually call art works, the same workmanship is required that through the primordial instrument of human hands builds the other, less durable and more useful things of the human artifice. (Arendt 2000, 177-78) In a 1964 interview with Gunter Gaus, Hannah Arendt described herself as a political theorist, who though trained as a philosopher had "said good-bye to philosophy once and for all." In identifying the tension between philosophy and politics, she differentiated man as a thinking being from man as an acting being, and she identified with the latter. She found that, because philosophers cannot be neutral or objective with regards to politics, they share a certain enmity toward politics, and she sought to avoid that response. Not surprisingly, she named Kant as an exception, because he understood this enmity to lie in the nature of the subject itself. In The Critique of Judgement, experience precedes reflective judgement, thus affirming a place for each subject's particular experiences. Kant, too, was a man of action.Kant's aesthetic judgment of taste, which is a normative but non-prescriptive process, makes room for Arendt's notions of worldliness and unpredictability. Critics have decried Arendt's political theory for its anti-rationalism, political existentialism and "aestheticization of politics," yet much can be learned from her clear commitment to equality, and the way she trusted and perhaps even idealized humanity (Curtis 1999, 18). She wrote, "Only action and speech relate specifically to this fact that to live always means to live among men, among those who are my equals. Hence, when I insert myself into the world, it is a world where others are already present" (Arendt 2000, 179). Given her interest in freedom, active engagement, critical thinking, and anti-instrumentalism, it is perhaps not surprising that Arendt found inspiration in Kant's conception of aesthetic judgment as requiring only communicative sociability, the object's purposeless purposiveness, and the spectator's free play of imagination and understanding.I am interested here in Arendt's aesthetics of the political life in relation to recent art that unwittingly fosters an engaged and open conception of the political. The works in question are not necessarily conscious of their political capacity. Rather, their presence assumes that spectators are [End Page 94] equals, and facilitates an active life, what Arendt described as the vita activa, as opposed to the vita contemplativa, the contemplative life. An active life, which requires a public space, entails active... (shrink)

My dissertation is an exploration of two theories of political judgment that are inspired by Kant's Critique of Judgment. Both Hannah Arendt and Jean Francois Lyotard appropriate different versions of Kantian reflective judgment as a model for making political decisions because it allows for differences in thought and action, and does not reduce politics to a fabrication guided by a universal conception. This dissertation examines the viability of both theories of judgment, and assesses the relation between (...) class='Hi'>political judgment, politics, and history. ;I begin by briefly summarizing the Critique of Judgment, and examining the factors of Kant's universal moral philosophy that are rejected by Arendt and Lyotard, in order to better understand the aspects that they appropriate for political judgment. I then explore Arendt's theory of political judgment based upon judgments of beauty. Through her theory of judgment, Arendt seeks to maintain the balance between valuing plurality, but at the same time, allowing the spectators to come to a political judgment based upon the good of the whole community. The relation between her theory of judgment and the philosophy of history is also discussed in light of her criticisms of instrumental reasoning. Next, I investigate Lyotard's theory of judgment that is based upon Kant's judgments of the sublime. Lyotard focuses upon the incommensurability of phrase genres that are manifested in his analysis of the differend . The differend concerns a wrong that cannot currently be expressed and is signaled by the feeling of the sublime. The link between the feeling of the sublime and history is explored, as well as the implications of Lyotard's theory of judgment upon his politics. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of five major differences between Arendt's and Lyotard's theories of judgment, focusing upon the temporality of judgment, the influence of the holocaust on their respective political theories, the difference between the beautiful and the sublime governing judgment, Lyotard's interpretation of Arendt's thought, and the connection between their theories of judgment and political action. Although their political strategies are important, the success of both of their theories of judgment are provisional because neither can settle the issues surrounding political agency and action that have arisen in the debate between modern and postmodern theories of politics. (shrink)

This article introduces a critical commentary to Hannah Arendt’s interpretation of Kant in her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. The author follows the scheme of what Arendt considers the three Kantian human perspectives: man as a rational being, man as an animal species, and man as a synthesis of the rational and the sensitive. Arendt’s research focuses on the contribution that the Kantian theory of the reflexive judgment can bring to a political theory, following the distinction between (...) actor and spectator. (shrink)

For Hannah Arendt, authority is the shape educational responsibility assumes. In our time, authority in Arendt’s sense is under pressure. The figure of Greta Thunberg shows the failure of adult generations, taken collectively, to take responsibility for the world and present and future generations of newcomers. However, in reflecting on Arendt’s use of authority, we argue that her account of authority also requires amendments. Arendt’s situating of educational authority in-between past and future adequately captures its (...) temporal dimension. We make explicit another, spatial, dimension: authority in-between world and earth. Arendt’s neglect of the material earth also has implications for the relational dimension of authority. Arendt’s authority depends on a dichotomy between the private and the public sphere. This is problematic. First, we agree with Arendt’s feminist critics that the personal can be made into the site of the political. Second, we point once more to Thunberg, the child, taking the public stage, thereby contesting the division between public and private. In response, we situate the relational dimension of authority in-between private and public. The three dimensions of educational authority taken together imply that it is situated in-between domains that cannot be reduced to each other or taken as absolutes: past and future, world and earth, and the private and public sphere. This brings us to our concept of ambiguous authority, which expresses the Arendtian nature of our reflections and the ways in which we seek to renew her original insights on educational authority. (shrink)

Crisis occupies an ambiguous place in the writings of Hannah Arendt. Not only does crisis undermine categories of judgment, but in doing so it eliminates prejudices as well, forcing us to judge without them. Although Arendt never had an opportunity to fully develop her understanding of judgment, we know that she considered it to be ‘the most political of man’s mental abilities,’ and her writings on education reflect this. In her essay, ‘The Crisis in Education’ she draws a (...) connection between judgment and crisis, linking it to the work of the classroom. It is this relationship, between crisis and judgment, that I examine. In doing so, I turn to two figures central to Arendt’s work – Immanuel Kant and Adolf Eichmann – each of whom embody opposing aspects of what it means to judge, epitomized by a conceptual tension between example and cliché. (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)

Hannah Arendt v svoji interpretaciji Kantove teorije »razsodne moči«, le-to vzame iz njenega prvotnega sobesedila, razmisleka o dobrem in lepem, ter ji podeli politični pomen. Po eni strani Kantov pojem »reflektirajoče razsodne moči« Arendtovi omogoči prikaz določene nujnosti v politični presoji, za katero je značilno, da se vedno odvija v singularnih okoliščinah in se ne more sklicevati na nobeno vnaprejšnje, univerzalno ali splošno merilo. Po drugi strani Arendtova interpretira »nezainteresirano ugajanje«, ki je pri Kantu predpostavka za estetsko sodbo, kot (...) nujni pogoj teoretičnega motrenja zgodovine. Pomembni interpreti, kot sta Beiner in Vollrath, so na osnovi tega trdili, da gre za protislovje. V svojem besedilu želim pokazati, da se to protislovje razreši v »hermenevtični etiki«, ki jo je možno pokazati v delih Hannah Arendt, celo v najbolj zgodnjih.Hannah Arendt’s interpretation of Kant’s conception of the »power of judgment« extracts this faculty from its intended context, considerations of the beautiful and of nature, and grants it a political significance. On the one hand, Kant’s conception of a »reflective power of judgment« offers Arendt the possibility of referring to a certain necessity in political judgments; judgments which always take place under singular conditions and which cannot presume a universal or general measure. On the other hand, Arendt interprets »disinterested pleasure«, which is for Kant a presupposition of aesthetic judgment, as a necessary condition for theoretical considerations of history. Between these two aspects of Arendt’s Kant interpretation, important scholars, such as Beiner and Vollrath, have claimed to find a contradiction. In my article I would like to show that this contradiction is dissolved by way of a »hermeneutical ethics«, which can be identified throughout the work of Hannah Arendt, even in its earliest forms. (shrink)

This article argues that Hannah Arendt’s essay “Civil Disobedience” contains a critique of white constitutionalism. A close reading of Arendt’s comments on the failure of Reconstruction to durably found Black citizenship reveals that the anti-Blackness of her account does not consist in ignoring the racialization of constitutional order but, to the contrary, in a dismissal of Black politics due to the limitations of a white constitutional heritage. In “Civil Disobedience,” Arendt thus stood on the edge of an insight that (...) she failed to develop more fully: Black movements had brought to light the limitations that racial domination places on the “augmentation” of America’s founding principles. For Arendt, the notion of the “principle” is meant to mediate the novelty of action with the durability of order. But to the extent that she views American institutions as defined by the “inherited crime” of slavery, feedback across temporal strata—between a principle in past, present, and future—is structurally blocked. The symbolic whiteness of citizenship undermines institutional durability, as it generates a crisis of constitutional authority for all. Tracing the sources behind Arendt’s pessimistic vision, the article demonstrates echoes between her account and the literature on which she relied: Tocqueville; Stanley Elkins; and, possibly, W. E. B. Du Bois. It concludes with a reading of Arendt’s commentary on Reconstruction as the attempt to recover a lost moment of foundation, an unredeemed promise of refounding. (shrink)

Niniejszy artykuł jest próbą wyjaśnienia pojęcia politycznego entuzjazmu, za pomocą którego Immanuel Kant wyraził stosunek do rewolucji francuskiej. Entuzjazm jako czysto rozumowy afekt, a nie jako kolektywnie przeżywana, irracjonalna euforia, pełni w rozważaniach królewieckiego filozofa ważną heurystyczną funkcję. Pozwala mu bowiem uzasadnić pozytywne znaczenie rewolucji, która na poziomie empirycznych faktów okazała się godną moralnego potępienia eskalacją przemocy. W pierwszej części przedstawiono definicję polityki, przydatne w dalszej analizy kategorii entuzjazmu. Głównym punktem odniesienia jest tu teoria polityczna Hannah Arendt. W (...) drugiej części postaram się wyjaśnić dwuznaczną postawę Kanta wobec rewolucji francuskiej, która z punktu widzenia moralnego została przez niego jednoznacznie potępiona, natomiast z punktu widzenia estetycznego i politycznego – oceniana została bardzo pozytywnie. Kluczem do zrozumienia tej ambiwalencji jest kategoria jawnej publiczności. W trzecim rozdziale przechodzę do głównego tematu tego artykułu, czyli kwestii entuzjazm w kontekście politycznym. (shrink)

Amidst the ongoing turmoil in the Middle East and the reshaping of political systems in the region, the Iranian people remain mired in difficulties on their path to democratization. Much of this can be blamed on the gradual decline in activity within Iranian civil society and the stagnation of political imagination. If Iran is to have a future built on the solid foundation of a viable and legitimate political authority, Iranian civic actors must reimagine and revisit (...) the notion of constitution-making through sustained dissent and deliberation. Hannah Arendt's ideas are extremely helpful in this regard. The main purpose of this essay will be to explore how some of her most useful concepts may be applicable in the Iranian context. Briefly tracing the history of Iran since the Islamic Revolution, the paper then turns to a deeper examination of Arendt’s ideas to determine how they can foster resistance, civic engagement and eventual legitimate authority. The focus in the end will be on what Iranians can do to begin anew, to build foundations for the future, and to tell themselves a new story about their identity. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt grasps modernity in terms of crisis and political modernity in terms of the crisis of authority. Because she ties the crisis of authority not simply to liberal political thought but to the entire Western philosophical tradition, Arendt responds to the crisis of authority with a critical modernism, i.e., a modernism that seeks to lay bare the gap between past and future that was covered up by the Roman trilogy of tradition, religion, and authority. This (...) modernism is critical because it intensifies rather than shies away from crisis. With this critical modernism, judgment emerges as the successor to authority, opening the door to a possible overcoming of metaphysics and of the estrangement of doing and thinking. Arendt’s reworking of a parable of Kafka’s dealing with the gap between past and future illustrates her turn to judgment and her attempt to overcome metaphysics. (shrink)

In this article I deal with Kant's concept of reflective judgment, and recover it through its links to the aesthetic dimension as its fundamental scenario. Then I go on to explain why Hannah Arendt understood this important Kantian connection, and why she thought it would allow her to develop it through a political dimension. Last, having reviewed both Kant and Arendt's contributions to the concept of reflective judgment, I recover my own input to the concept by showing its (...) linguistic dimension based on the Heideggerian notion of world-disclosure. With this in mind, I show how the concept of reflective judgment is the most suitable to analyze evil actions. (shrink)

In this article I deal with Kant's concept of reflective judgment, and recover it through its links to the aesthetic dimension as its fundamental scenario. Then I go on to explain why Hannah Arendt understood this important Kantian connection, and why she thought it would allow her to develop it through a political dimension. Last, having reviewed both Kant and Arendt's contributions to the concept of reflective judgment, I recover my own input to the concept by showing its (...) linguistic dimension based on the Heideggerian notion of world-disclosure. With this in mind, I show how the concept of reflective judgment is the most suitable to analyze evil actions. (shrink)

This article considers Hannah Arendt's posthumously published Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, lectures delivered at the New School for Social Research in the fall semester of 1970. By taking Arendt's highly provocative reading of Kant as a point of departure, the essay probes Arendt's own theory of judgment. Arendt frequently draws distinctions that prove untenable. If the faculty of judgment, in Arendt's words, has to do with one's “ability to make distinctions,” and yet her own distinctions continually falter, (...) and that in a text about judgment, then it seems that she thwarts her own discourse. More specifically, she complicates her assertions by staging something that she, in Kantian terms, describes as “enlarged thought”; she explores the subject of judgment from different perspectives and allows for perspectival plurality, thereby “wooing,” as it were, our consent. In so doing, Arendt, in thoroughly Kantian fashion, establishes judgment as a performative category that defies being taught and instead remains a matter of practice. (shrink)

Artykuł analizuje estetyczną formę polityki Hannah Arendt w interpretacji Jima Josefsona. Zdaniem autora „Hannah Arendt’s Aesthetic Politics: Freedom and the Beautiful” - filozofka poszukiwała swego własnego „transcendentnego momentu” (der Augenblick) i w celu zidentyfikowania go analizowała prace takich myślicieli jak: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Heidegger, Kafka, Benjamin. Przemyślana krytyka każdego z powyższych nurtów pozwoliła jej sformułować własną koncepcję określoną przez Josefsona mianem „momentu estetycznego”. Wyodrębniając „wolność piękna”, jako trzecią twarz wolności na równi ze znanymi czytelnikom Arendt wolnością działania i (...) umysłu, amerykański filozof w swej książce skupia się na wykazaniu, jak ta wolność, zakorzeniona w fenomenologii Jaspersa i niemetafizycznym odczytaniu Kanta, ma posłużyć za antidotum na wyobcowanie ze świata, które jego zdaniem, jest tematem spajającym wszystkie prace Arendt. (shrink)

This paper documents an encounter with some issues that deal with the education of children as mentioned by Hannah Arendt in her essay "The crisis in education." Arendt’s invocation of "the obligation that the existence of children imposes on the whole society" is a key element of an ethical and political commitment to the education of new generations—especially in a world disillusioned by the estrangement of the human, and in which the undeniable criteria that the past – (...) as authority – bequeathed to us as support for action and judgment on the world has faltered. If education should not be entirely responsible for the world, at least it should be able to insert children into a public culture that allows them, in turn, to appropriate it. The issues addressed by Arendt, although full of criticism and redolent with paradoxes, move us to think that only an education founded on a public horizon is able to educate children in a way that allows them the opportunity to act in the world, and to be able to discern civilization from barbarism, the fair from the unfair, truth from lies, and good from evil. On the one hand, her reflections reveal the utopian aspect of her thought, while on the other they make clear the collective responsibility that the arrival of children in a pre-existing world imposes on every human society. (shrink)

Author: Moskalewicz Marcin Title: AESTHETIZATION OF POLITICS ACCORDING TO HANNAH ARENDT (Estetyzacja polityki w ujęciu Hannah Arendt) Source: Filo-Sofija year: 2005, vol:.5, number: 2005/1, pages: 203-220 Keywords: ARENDT, AESTHETIZATION OF POLITICS, CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT Discipline: PHILOSOPHY Language: POLISH Document type: ARTICLE Publication order reference (Primary author’s office address): E-mail: www:The article reflects on the problem of aesthetization of politics in Hannah Arendt’s work. It starts with the reconstruction of Arendt’s concept of the human condition, with the intention (...) of placing the political within it. Then, by exploring the theatrical metaphor of political life the author attempts to show in what sense can we say that the political and the aesthetical intertwine in Arendt’s thought. The author also discusses the reproach of the aesthetization of politics and its link to fascism, arguing that paying a closer attention to the distinction between creative and performative arts may help to avoid it. In conclusion, Arendt’s reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment serves as a basis for a more sympathetic interpretation of her aesthetization of politics, in which the gap between the moral and the aesthetical is reduced. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between knowledge, politics, and education in the context of the global crisis of democracy and the growing prevalence of political polarization. Focusing on the issue of vaccine hesitancy, I explore how citizens’ reference to knowledge and values shapes their political judgements and argue for the importance of education in facilitating informed and reasoned decision-making. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s dialectical account of politics and knowledge, I highlight the limitations of reducing political debates (...) to a quest for ‘right knowledge’, arguing that it neglects the coordination of diverse values and interpretations that is essential to democratic processes. To do so, I discuss ‘educationalization’ of the political during the COVID-19 pandemic, wherein the dissemination of empirically grounded information became a strategy to generate public consent. However, my article cautions against the hegemony of empirical knowledge, which can lead to despotic politics and the proliferation of misinformation. To ensure differentiated and reasonable judgements in uncertain situations and conflicts, I turn to Arendt’s concept of reflective and political judgement, emphasizing the ability to imagine others’ perspectives and construct general principles. The educational task, therefore, encompasses not only conveying factual knowledge but also nurturing reflective judgement that strikes a balance between factual truth and divergent interpretations, values, and interests. (shrink)

This paper reconsiders the event in International Relations (IR) through the writings of Hannah Arendt. The event has for too long been neglected in IR; international events are overwhelmingly conceived as mere happenings that have meaning only within the process and temporal structure of the theory from which they are understood, and as holding no or only limited meaning in and of themselves. In her work on political theory and her reflections on totalitarianism, however, Arendt elaborates a rich (...) view of the event and its relationship to history, one that offers an alternative way of thinking about international relations. Arendt urges us to remain open to the possibility, however difficult, of conceiving of the event as meaningful outside of the processes within which our established mode of thoughts would have us subsume it. This requires on the part of the historian a commitment to judgement, to a recognition of the importance of imagination and impartiality that gives meaning to the event for others. In explicating Arendt's complex notion of the genuine political event, the paper aims not merely to demonstrate the intrinsic interest of this conception of the event to her thought, but to add to the small but growing number of works in IR that have found fruitful new avenues of thought in Arendt's various writings, and also to recent discussions on the proper relationship between history and IR theory. (shrink)

​Hannah Arendt liked to present herself in the image of a thinker who had jettisoned the grand metaphysical ambitions of the Western philosophical tradition. In this, Arendt anticipated later “anti-foundationalist” themes in what came to be called post-modernist theory. Arendt even went so far as to resist the notion that she was a philosopher at all. In my view this self-understanding was way off the mark. Juxtaposing her idea of “judging” in the posthumously-published Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (...) with a classic conception of judgment from the Western philosophy canon – namely Aristotle’s key notion of phronesis, practical wisdom – demonstrates that Arendt easily matches the metaphysical ambitions of the philosophical tradition. For a thinker like Arendt, chucking off philosophy turns out to be easier said than done. In fact, properly appreciating the judging idea in the Kant Lectures conducts us into the very centre of Arendt’s political philosophy. (shrink)

In this article, I reconstruct Hannah Arendt's theory of judgment around a number of key themes. After having distinguished two models of judgment, one based on the standpoint of the actor, the other on the standpoint of the spectator, I go on to examine their most distinctive features, in particular, the link between judgment, the imagination, and the ability to think 'representatively'. I also examine the philosophical sources of Arendt's theory of judgment, namely, Kant's theory of aesthetic judgment and (...) its criteria of validity. (shrink)