Continental Philosophy

1.  Editorial: In this Issue of KRITIKE: An Online Journal of Philosophy – The Editor

Featured Essay:

2. To Build or to Destroy?  The Philippine Experience with Walls and a Southeast Asian Perspective – Ranhilio Callangan Aquino

Articles:

3. Some Useful Lessons from Richard Rorty’s Political Philosophy for Philippine Postcolonialism – F. P. A. Demeterio

4. Adorno, Obama, and Empire: Reflections on the U.S. Presidential Election and the Next President – Lukas Kaelin

5. Heidegger, Hegel, Marx: Marcuse and the Theory of Historicity – Jeffry V. Ocay

6. Derrida’s Turn to Franciscan Philosophy – Marko Zlomislic

7. Deconstruction and the Transformation of Husserlian Phenomenology – Chung Chin-Yi

8. Toward a Return to Plurality in Arendtian Judgment – Jack E. Marsh Jr.

9. Mistaking Judgments of the Agreeable and Judgments of Taste – Francis Raven

10. The Limits of Misogyny: Schopenhauer, “On Women” – Thomas Grimwood

11. Haecceitas and the Question of Being: Heidegger and Duns Scotus – Philip Tonner

12. Kong Zi on Good Governance – Moses Aaron T. Angeles

13. The Problem of the Inefficacy of Knowledge in Early Buddhist Soteriology – Ryan Showler

From this issue of the New Yorker.

The Departments of Philosophy, Communications, and Foreign Languages at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville will be hosting the third independent conference for the Hannah Arendt Circle March 27-29, 2009.

We invite individual submissions for papers on any aspect of Arendt’s work, including critiques and applications of her thinking.

Please send an abstract of the paper, by e-mail (750 word limit). Abstracts should be formatted for anonymous review and submitted to the program committee chair, Karin Fry at kfry@uwsp.edu on or before November 14th, 2008.

Please indicate “Arendt Circle submission” in the subject heading, and include the abstract as a “.doc” attachment to your message. Program decisions will be announced by the end of December.

Program Committee: Karin Fry, University of Wisconsin Stevens Point, , Tama Weisman, Quincy University, Irene McMullin, University of Arkansas

Our first two independent meetings were outstanding, and we are looking forward to the same camaraderie and intense discussion of Arendt’s work at this year’s conference. Each speaker will have approximately 35 minutes for paper presentation and discussion combined —papers should be a maximum of 3000 words (15-20 minutes).

The University of Arkansas is located in the beautiful Ozark Mountains. Lodging has been reserved at Carnell Hall: 1-800-295-9118. See also www.innatcarnallhall.com.

Program and other information will be available no later than January 2009 at: www.arendtcircle.com

Link

A correspondence between Hannah Arendt and the theologian Hans-Jürgen Benedict (in German)

Foucault Live

What Schopenhauer taught Beckett

TOC

The time of hybridity — Simone Drichel

Arendt and Nietzsche on responsibility and futurity — Rosalyn Diprose

Levinas, Habermas and modernity — Nicholas H. Smith

Antinomies of transcritique and virtue ethics: An Adornian critique — Giuseppe Tassone

A law’s tale: John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance — Gertrud Koch

From avenging to revolutionary force: John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance — Hauke Brunkhorst

A special issue of Telos

Link

TOC

The role of judgment and orientation in hermeneutics — Rudolf A. Makkreel

Aesthetic reflection and its ethical significance: A critique of the Kantian solution — Christoph Menke

Does Kant share Sancho’s dream?: Judgment and sensus communis — Alessandro Ferrara

Reflective judgment as world disclosure — María Pía Lara

Imagination and judgment in Kant’s practical philosophy — Alfredo Ferrarin

Rereading `Truth and Politics’ — Ronald Beiner

Rereading Rawls in Arendtian light: Reflective judgment and historical experience — Carlos Thiebaut

Judgment and the reification of the faculties: A reconstructive reading of Arendt’s Life of the Mind — Robert Fine

Conscience, morality and judgment: An inquiry into the subjective basis of human rights — Serena Parekh

From the Australian philosophy radio show – Philosophers Zone:

Attending the trial of Adolph Eichmann, the war criminal, the philosopher Hannah Arendt was struck not by his satanic evil but by how unthinking he was. This week Max Deutscher, author of a recent book on Arendt’s work, discusses her views on thought, thinking and judging.

And a review of Arendt’s The Jewish Writings (link to the review)

Blackwell is granting temporary free access to some of its journal articles. Two articles from Critical Quarterly and one from the Yale Review may be of interest:

JEAN-MICHEL RABATÉ: Aspace of Dumbillsilly: when Joyce translates Lacan

ANDREW BRIGHTON: Consumed by the political: the ruination of the Arts Council

MARTIN GREENBERG: Concerning Hannah Arendt. She knew she was right

The Departments of Philosophy and Comparative Literature at Emory University will be hosting the second independent conference for the Hannah Arendt Circle, March 28-30, 2008.

Papers on any aspect of Arendt’s work, as well as studies, critiques, and applications of her thinking, are welcome.

Please send an abstract of the paper, by e-mail (750 word limit). Abstracts should be formatted for anonymous review and submitted to the program committee chair, Stephen Schulman, at sschulman@elon.edu on or before November 14th, 2007.

Please indicate “Arendt Circle submission” in the subject heading, and include the abstract as a “.doc” attachment to your message. Program decisions will be announced by mid-December.

Program Committee:
Stephen Schulman, Elon University
Karin Fry, University of Wisconsin Stevens Point
Adrian Switzer, Emory University

Our first independent meeting was outstanding, and we are looking forward to the same camaraderie and intense discussion of Arendt’s work at this year’s conference. Like last year, the meeting will begin with an informal welcoming reception on Friday evening. There will be morning and afternoon paper sessions on Saturday, followed by a business meeting and dinner. The conference will conclude with paper sessions on Sunday morning. Each speaker will have approximately 35 minutes for paper presentation and discussion combined —papers should be a maximum of 3000 words (15-20 minutes).

Lodging has been reserved at the Holiday Inn Decatur: phone 404.371.0204.
Program and other information will be available no later than January 2008 at:
www.arendtcircle.com

Trevor Norris explores the contribution of Hannah Arendt and Jean Baudrillard to our appreciation of the consumer society and education.

We are, as it seems, considering not only how a city, but also a luxurious city, comes into being… Let’s look at a feverish city…This healthy one isn’t adequate any more, but must already be gorged with a bulky mass of things. Republic Book II, 372e-373b

 

 

We can’t let the terrorists stop us from shopping. George Bush, September 2001.

 

The twentieth century philosophers Hannah Arendt and Jean Baudrillard are rarely connected, yet there are significant areas of overlap regarding their account of consumerism and our consumers’ society. Both explain the recent trend of making what is private become public: Baudrillard describes this as making the private ‘explicit,’ while Arendt outlines the modern ascent of the activities of the private realm or oikos into the public realm. Secondly, both observe that human relations have been altered and are increasingly mediated by objects. For Baudrillard this entails an eclipse of reality, while for Arendt it entails a loss of the polis and life in the public realm. Hannah Arendt opens The Human Condition with a description of Sputnik, an exemplar for all that is wrong and dangerous in modernity. The passengers on this “earth-born object made by man”[5] would be the first to fully inhabit a realm entirely of human creation, in which humans were released from the confines of the human condition of earthly existence to fully enter the realm of the human artifice. For Arendt, this event, a “rebellion against human existence as it has been given”[6], indicates the magnitude of our worldly alienation. This rebellion means the loss of the polis and erosion of speech, in which we “adopt a way of life in which speech is no longer meaningful,” and “move in a world where speech has lost its power.”[7] Jean Baudrillard points towards similar recent events: the proliferation of signs combined with the separation of the sign from the object leaves humans inhabiting a symbolic realm entirely of their own making, entailing an “eclipse of the real”. Just as we come to inhabit the realm of the human artifice, so too do we dwell in the realm of signs, symbols, and simulations. Baudrillard’s original work in semiotics will provide a new analysis of consumer society, and help explain how communication structures and sign systems can preserve consumer society long after speech has been drained of its power and meaning.

Continue reading here 

Here is the link to Arendt's Human Condition

Large pdf (27mb) 

The Paradoxical Liberty of Bio-Power: Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault on Modern Politics
By Frederick M. Dolan

ABSTRACT: For Hannah Arendt, spontaneous, “initiatory” human action and interaction are suppressed by the normalizing pressures of society once “life” – that is, sheer life – becomes the primary concern of politics, as it does, she finds, in the modern age. Arendt’s concept of the social is indebted to Martin Heidegger’s analysis of everyday Dasein in Being and Time, and contemporary political philosophers inspired by Heidegger, such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Giorgio Agamben, tend to reproduce her account of the withdrawal of the political in modernity. In this essay, I complicate Arendt’s theory by turning to Michel Foucault’s parallel but diverging understanding of the nature of power in modern society to show, surprisingly, that Foucault’s narrative of the emergence of modern power pictures a society that is more, not less, politicized.

KEY WORDS: Arendt, bio-power, Foucault, Lacoue-Labarthe, modernity, Nancy, pastoral power, the
social, rulership.

The significant role of literary texts in Hannah Arendt's theoretical writings has received far too little attention. Poetry influenced and formed her political and philosophical theories aimed at revealing ideologically masked truths; in her "Denktagebuch" (Diary of Thoughts), she claims one can only expect the truth from poets, not philosophers. In her theoretical writings, Hannah Arendt constantly made references to literature and poetry, and even wrote a series of biographical essays on important writers and poets. Very few people know, however, that Hannah Arendt wrote her own poetry both in German and English. The philosopher was a friend and confidant to many writers, some of whom immortalized her as a literary figure in the books she herself encouraged them to write. The films, video recordings, radio excerpts, photos, letters and manuscripts in this exhibition present Hannah Arendt as a literature lover and expert, a poet, friend and muse to other writers, and a literary figure herself.

Details here 

From the Chronicle (by Russel Jacoby) 

A street is named after her. Back-to-back conferences celebrate her. New books champion her. Hannah Arendt, who was born 100 years ago this past October, has joined the small world of philosophical heroes. Nor has this attention come to her only since her death in 1975. During her life, she received honorary degrees from Princeton, Smith, and other colleges and universities. Denmark awarded her its Sonning Prize for "commendable work that benefits European culture," also bestowed on Albert Schweitzer and Winston Churchill. When she gave public lectures, students jammed the aisles and doorways.

On Truth, Lies, Politics, and Media

In Dialogue with Hannah Arendt

Workshop

November 28 – 29, 2006

Goethe-Institut Washington; 812 Seventh Street NW, Washington, DC

202-289-1200, www.goethe.de/washington

No charge. RSVP 202-289-1200 ext. 166 or info@washington.goethe.org

Program Link (pdf) 

Audio lecture by Svetlana Boym

From Library of Congress, three essays by Jerome Kohn, Director, Hannah Arendt Center, New School University

• The World of Hannah Arendt
• Totalitarianism: The Inversion of Politics
• Evil: The Crime against Humanity