Love and Saint Augustine, Hannah Arendt
Love and Saint Augustine, Hannah Arendt
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Love and Saint Augustine

Author: Hannah Arendt, Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott, Judith Chelius Stark

Narrator: Elizabeth Wiley

Unabridged: 12 hr 11 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 10/17/2023


Synopsis

Hannah Arendt, the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition, began her scholarly career with an exploration of Saint Augustine's concept of caritas, or neighborly love, written under the direction of Karl Jaspers and the influence of Martin Heidegger. After her German academic life came to a halt in 1933, Arendt carried her dissertation into exile in France, and years later took the same battered and stained copy to New York.

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Arendt was simultaneously annotating and revising her dissertation on Augustine, amplifying its argument with terms and concepts she was using in her political works. The dissertation became a bridge over which Arendt traveled back and forth between 1929 Heidelberg and 1960s New York, carrying with her Augustine's question about the possibility of social life in an age of rapid political and moral change.

In Love and Saint Augustine, political science professor Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and philosophy professor Judith Chelius Stark make this important early work accessible for the first time. Here is a completely corrected and revised English translation that incorporates Arendt's own substantial revisions and provides additional notes based on letters, contracts, and other documents as well as the recollections of Arendt's friends and colleagues.

About Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was an influential German political theorist and philosopher who came to the United States as a refugee from the Nazis in 1940. She held a number of academic positions at American universities including the University of California, Berkeley; Northwestern University; the University of Chicago; and Princeton University, where she was the first woman appointed to a full professorship. Her works, which deal with issues of power, authority, revolution, thought, and judgment, include The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Between Past and Future, and the incomplete and posthumously published The Life of the Mind.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Jon on September 14, 2018

The core of this book is a newly edited version of Hannah Arendt’s 1929 Ph.D. dissertation on Saint Augustine’s conception of love. As a student of Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, she approached the topic from an existentialist point of view, that is by trying to grasp how Augustine understood lo......more

Goodreads review by Stan on September 10, 2018

Love and Saint Augustine is a translation plus a philosophical analysis and interpretation of the dissertation of Hannah Arendt, one of the twentieth century's most well-known writers and political philosophers. It first appeared in German as Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin in 1929, but was not reiss......more

Goodreads review by Truls on May 25, 2023

Augustinus brukar jag karaktärisera som en gnällspik - men en användbar gnällspik. Jag tycker att jag har goda skäl för den generaliseringen; klagandet på världen är återkommande i hans texter, liksom ursäktandet av egna fel. Genom Arendt får jag upp ögonen för en annan tolkning av samma gnällighet.......more

Goodreads review by Marks54 on February 05, 2024

This is Arendt’s dissertation and it is on love and the philosophy of St. Augustine -and Heidegger was on her committee! I need to do more processing here. I am not sure how the City of God links up with Origins of Totalitarianism. How does the explication of Jesus’ two great commandments relate to......more

Goodreads review by Prabhat on September 19, 2019

"The trouble with human happiness is that it is constantly beset by fear. It is not the lack of possessing but the safety of possession that is at stake."......more