Tag: Hannah Arendt
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Forgiveness in Charleston and South Africa: Political or Theological?
After the families of the victims of the Emanuel AME church shooting unilaterally forgave the shooter, I’ve been thinking again about forgiveness. (Some previous posts here.) In particular, I am wondering again about the relationship between theological and political forgiveness. The classic Enlightenment description of the duty to forgive is derived from the Christian tradition…
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Arendt, Antisemitism, and the Chicago Teachers’ Union Strike
I am one of those ideologically-impure liberals that worries a lot about public sector unions. On the one hand, I favor workplace democracy and collaboration; on the other hand, I worry about the fact that as union membership has declined, the majority of remaining union members haved tended to be at the top of the…
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Res Publica: Philosophy, Scholarship, Work
In responding to my post on the topic, Peter Levine says of “public philosophy” that I am not yet sure what it means or whether I want to be part of it. To me, that is a major indictment. He then goes on to give a useful account of “public scholarship” that we can take as a contrast:…
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Arendtian Natality, Caplan’s Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, and Antinatalism
Because of my work on Hannah Arendt, I often struggle with the apparent incongruity between her account of natality and my own tendency towards antinatalism. Natality is at the heart of Arendt’s project, a rejection of the Heideggerian obsession with mortality and being-towards-death: “It is in the nature of beginning that something new is started…
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Ideology and Self-Sealing Arguments
From Understanding Arguments by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Robert Fogelin, which I use in my critical thinking course: Ideologies and worldviews tend to be self-sealing. The Marxist ideology sometimes has this quality. If you fail to see the truth of the Marxist ideology, that just shows that your social consciousness has not been raised. The very…
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A Duty to Forgive?
Part 1: Forgiveness and the Problem of Irreversibility Part 2: Forgiveness as a Manifestation of Divine Charity Part 3: A Duty to Forgive? Part 4: Prejudice as the Crystallization of Judgments Part 5: Charity as a Flight from Politics Part 6: Publicity without Politics Arendt’s response raises interesting questions: “Of course I am prejudiced, namely against charity,” she wrote. In her letter…
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Questions
A candidate trying to decide between graduate schools recently asked me which “types of public administration, political, or civic problems you are attempting to provide solutions to with your research? For example, which questions are you tackling right now?” Of course, right now I’m grading. But in a slightly more general sense of “right now,”…
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Arendt responds to Auden: “Of course I am prejudiced, namely against charity.”
Working in the Arendt archives this week, I came across this draft of a letter of Hannah Arendt’s, responding the poet Auden’s essay on Falstaff and his criticisms of certain aspects of her account of forgiveness in The Human Condition: Dear Wystan Auden – I just read the Falstaff piece — had some trouble getting…
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Refugee Life
“We must… build our political philosophy anew starting from the one and only figure of the refugee.” (Giorgio Agamben) If the nation-state is in decline, it is principally because the nation-form, that coalition of fellow natives born of common blood and soil has given way to the denizen-foreigner: the resident-alien who through dint of illegal…
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White Men and Victimhood
I’ve been having an ongoing conversation with a number of people about the supposed ‘plight’ of the well-educated white male. We’ve been searching for the non-existential root causes to the alienation that many left-leaning white men experience in US culture, especially the academy. The idea is that, while we are all human and troubled by…