Fascination and uneasiness Hannah Arendt and the examination of the mind for a new political philosophy

Abstract

The research aims to investigate the route of the reworking of the mental activities undertaken by Hannah Arendt. Taking her last writings as a starting point, especially The Life of the Mind, we seek to retrace the steps of her journey examining and comparing the conceptual responses to political events, the specificities of her appropriations within her critical analysis of the tradition. The focus is to attend to the question of Arendt's return to mental activities. The research supports the interpretation of this return as a rework necessary to new political philosophy. To do so, it is important to focus on two main paths, namely: one in which Arendt recovers from Socrates the meanings of autonomy of thought, disputing, for example, the totalizing problematic bias of Heidegger's philosophy on the one hand, and, on the other, the relationship between thought and judgment from various Kantian concepts, especially the aesthetic reflective judgment and the sensus communis, which draws on possibility of a critical review of the philosophical tradition about the thought/action bias. The research will seek to reelaborate the questioning of the concepts of thought, will and judgment throughout Arendt's work conceiving this effort as intrinsic to the intention of the author to lay the foundations for a new political philosophy, giving a two-fold meaning to The Life of the Mind: the conclusiveness of a heterodox reflection, and preparation of new conceptual resources for political philosophy. (AU)