Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Heidegger

Hannah Arendt and the Human Duty to Think

Shai Tubali considers the roots and implications of Arendt’s active philosophy.

In 1964 German journalist Gunter Gaus interviewed Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) for his TV show Zur Person. The conversation began with a peculiar exchange: Gaus kept insisting on defining Arendt as a ‘philosopher’ while she kept gently pushing back the title. Gaus looked perplexed. Arendt no doubt came from the rich tradition of German philosophy, and was the direct student of giant philosophical minds such as Martin Heidegger and Carl Jaspers. She was the acclaimed author of major philosophical classics such as The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and The Human Condition (1958), and everything she had written had clearly been an intense dialogue with the ideas of Socrates and Kant, Hegel and Heidegger.

…