Ghassan Hage has been sacked by Germany’s prestigious Max Planck Foundation due to his trenchant criticism of Israel’s war. It’s just the latest in an ongoing culture war in Germany.
In his essays, Walter Benjamin sought to understand the nature of modernity. He drew on Marxism but was not contained by it, ranging across literature, art, popular culture, even Jewish mysticism.
A new book follows four women philosophers through ten of the worst years in the 20th century, spanning 1933, the year Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, to the thick of the second world war.
Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann was anything but banal. His case is an apt reminder of how evil agents can deflect accountability, denying victims even the thin consolation of the moral high ground.
As a child of Hungarian Jews, reading Eichmann in Jerusalem was a revelation to Peter Christoff. Yet might the ‘Eichmann problem’ of criminal disregard apply, today to those exploiting fossil fuels?
Children live through the same wars as adults. The effects of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on children will have long-lasting effects, and underscores the urgency of a peaceful resolution now.
While AI is intended to help us, it tempts us to abandon judgment and moral responsibility. And without a proper understanding of how it works, we cannot circumvent its negative effects.
Once something bound up with other people, more recently ‘happiness’ is seen as something very individual. Has our dependence on each other during lockdown changed our sense of where happiness lies?
Despite the nihilism and pessimism of internet memes, people ultimately understand the direness of the danger posed by a powerful virus, climate change and global instability.
To grasp how extraordinary evils are often committed by ordinary people, we need to consider how we define evil, and most importantly, whom we consider to be the agents of evil.
The 20th-century philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote how refugees, in the absence of legal rights, were forced to live in a state of ‘absolute lawlessness.’ Her words matter today.
Will the Timol case create the necessary political will to open dozens more inquests into apartheid deaths? Maybe, but government machinery has proven to be rusty and extremely slow.
The term “meme” was coined in 1976. Today, these cultural artefacts have gone viral, and are redrawing the boundaries of acceptable political discourse.
Hannah Arendt, a political theorist, fled Germany during Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and later wrote about ‘the banality of evil.’ Her work has recently become a best-seller. Here’s why.
In a world out of balance, one in which arrogance and unaccountability combine in a corrosive synergy, humility can offer a powerful alternative vision of how to approach democratic government.
In 1961, German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt was sent by The New Yorker to cover Adolf Eichmann’s trial, in Jerusalem, Israel, where he faced execution for crimes against humanity, war crimes, crimes…