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‘When others understand the same way that I have, that gives me satisfaction, like a sense of being at home.’
Hannah Arendt is most famous for her landmark book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), which chronicles the notorious Nazi official Adolf Eichmann’s war crimes trial in 1961. Conducted at the height of her influence, Arendt’s unusually candid interview with the German journalist Günter Gaus in 1964 is a revealing window on to her biography, process and worldview. The sprawling conversation covers topics including her youth as a German Jew amid the Nazi Party’s rise; why she eschewed the label ‘philosopher’ in favour of ‘political theorist’; and how her work was driven by a need to understand rather than a desire to make an impact. The discussion provides an appropriately complex portrait of the famed thinker, placing her rigorous intellectual work in the context of her life and times.
Subtitles: Philosophy Overdose
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Philosophy of mind
‘Am I not at least something?’ A surreal dive into Descartes’s Meditations
3 minutes
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Meaning and the good life
Why Orwell urged his readers to celebrate the spring, cynics be damned
11 minutes
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History
Hags, seductresses, feminist icons – how gender dynamics manifest in witches
13 minutes
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Fairness and equality
‘To my old master’ – a freed slave answers the request to return to his old plantation
7 minutes
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Ethics
Plato saw little value in privacy. How do his ideas hold up in the information age?
5 minutes
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Information and communication
‘Astonished and somewhat terrified’ – Victorians’ reactions to the phonograph
36 minutes
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Virtues and vices
Why Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith were divided on the virtues of vanity
5 minutes
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History
From Afghanistan to Virginia – the Muslims who fought in the American Civil War
22 minutes
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The ancient world
Petty squabbles and bloody battles – the life of an ancient Roman soldier
18 minutes