Hannah Arendt: Challenges of Plurality

by Maria Robaszkiewicz (Editor), Tobias Matzner (Editor)

Overview

This volume explores challenges posed by plurality, as understood by Hannah Arendt, but also the opportunities it offers. It is an interdisciplinary collection of chapters, including contributions from different traditions of philosophy, political science, and history. The book offers novel perspectives on central issues in research on Arendt, reconfiguring the existing interpretations and reinforcing the line of interpretation illuminating the phenomenological facets of Arendt’s theory.

The authors of the contributions to this volume decisively put the notion of plurality in the center of the collected interpretations, pointing out that plurality in its dialectic form of commonality, and difference is not only, as assumed by default, one of the most important notions in Arendt’s theory, but the very central one. At the same time, plurality is a central issue in many current debates, from populism and hate speech to migration and privacy. This collection therefore connects the theoretical advancements regarding Arendt and other political thinkers with some of the most pressing contemporary issues.

This book will be of interest to scholars and advanced students from philosophy, political theory and related fields studying contemporary challenges of plurality as well as scholars interested in the work of Hannah Arendt.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783030817114
Publisher:	Springer International Publishing
Publication date:	11/16/2021
Series:	Women in the History of Philosophy and Sciences , #10
Edition description:	1st ed. 2022
Pages:	195
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Maria Robaszkiewicz is assistant professor at Paderborn University and associate researcher at the Center for History of Women Philosophers and Scientists. She earned her doctoral degree in 2015 with a study on Hannah Arendt’s concept of exercises in political thinking and its relevance today (published in 2017 with Springer). Her research interests include philosophical theories of migration, Hannah Arendt and the reception of her thought, political philosophy, critical phenomenology, and feminist phenomenology. Her current research project focuses on phenomenological examination of migration experience.

Tobias Matzner is professor for media, algorithms and society at Paderborn University. He studied both computer science and philosophy and holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. His research focuses on the intersection of technology, culture and politics. In particular, he is interested in novel perspectives on the politics of technology with recourse to Arendt and other critical phenomenologist thinkers.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Plurality-centered notion of politics and it’s potential for (Adornian) critical theory (Albrecht).- Chapter 2. The embodiment of political freedom: Spontaneous movement, plurality and the ontological constitution of public space (Borren).- Chapter 3. Plurality and the claims of alterity (Ramos).- Chapter 4. Feeling plurality. How affectability leads to political judgment (Hecker).- Chapter 5. Singularity, duality, plurality: On thoughtlessness, friendship and politics in Hannah Arendt’s work (Holst).- Chapter 6. Anti-plurality and genocide: Hannah Arendt’s understanding of Holocaust perpetrators and contemporary Holocaust Research (Kunath).- Chapter 7. Reconceiving solidarity in the wake of plurality (McInerney).- Chapter 8. From the darkness to the light: Hannah Arendt’s phenomenology of migration (Robaszkiewicz).- Chapter 9. On a rhetorical ground of human togetherness: Plurality and mediality in Arendt and Peirce (Topa).- Chapter 10. Race, religion and refugees: Arendt’sambiguous analysis of nation-states (Topolski).- Chapter 11. Arendt and the legitimate leadership of plural persons: Hierarchy and the limits of horizontal power relations (Weinman).