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PHILOSOPHERS NEWSContemporary philosophers · ideas · books
Philosopher
German-American political theorist — totalitarianism, action and statelessness
New School for Social Research, New York · United States · d. 14 October 1906 (Linden, Hanover, Prussia) — 4 December 1975 (New York City)
Fled Germany in 1933 after eight days in police custody in Berlin, and held no citizenship again until she was naturalised in the United States in December 1951, eighteen years without a state. Formally stripped of German nationality in 1937, she turned that experience into the argument of The Origins of Totalitarianism: that rightlessness begins when a person loses any polity willing to count them.
On 4 October 1903 Otto Weininger shot himself in Vienna at twenty-three, months after publishing Sex and Character, a book of real brilliance and real poison. On the same date in 1957 Sputnik left the earth and gave Hannah Arendt the opening of The Human Condition; and in 1582 the calendar simply lost ten days.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hannah Arendt, Otto Weininger
Falling fertility and ageing in rich societies, and migration across every border, force an old question back open: who makes up a political community, and who gets to decide? A reading through Arendt, Carens, Walzer, Miller, Pogge and Parfit.
Will Kymlicka, Thomas Pogge, Philippe Van Parijs, Hannah Arendt
Heidelberg University, its Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the city have named Seyla Benhabib the 2026 laureate of the 25,000-euro Karl Jaspers Prize, citing a life's work on justice, rights and migration and a voice raised, in the jury's words, 'against the evil spirit of an age'. The ceremony is on 29 April 2027.
Jürgen Habermas, Seyla Benhabib, Hannah Arendt
The argument about artificial intelligence and democracy is usually run as a question of benefit and harm. The harder question is authorship. Arendt, Habermas, Foucault, Rousseau, Marx and Norbert Wiener each supply a piece of it, and the 2026 research supplies some awkward facts.
Jürgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Norbert Wiener
