Everyone is welcome to this reading group on Hannah Arendt’s Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. We’ll spend the first two sessions discussing Arendt’s reading of Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment. Then we’ll devote the final session to recent critical efforts to extend Arendt’s thinking on judgment to contemporary problems in aesthetics and political theory. The group should be of interest to anyone interested in debates about aesthetic education, criticism, and judgment and evaluation in the humanities.

All meetings will be held in the Owen Walker Room at Oriel College, from 11:30 to 1:00pm.

23 May: Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ‘Postscriptum to Thinking’ and lecture sessions 1-7 (pp. 3-46)

6 June: Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, lecture sessions 8-13 and ‘Imagination’ (pp. 46-85)

13 June: readings from Linda M. G. Zerilli, A Democratic Theory of Judgment and D. N. Rodowick, An Education in Judgment: Hannah Arendt and the Humanities.

* Linda M. G. Zerilli, ‘ “We Feel Our Freedom: Imagination and Judgment in the Thought of Hannah Arendt,’ Political Theory 33.2 (April 2005): 158-88 (available on SOLO) * D. N. Rodowick, An Education in Judgment: Hannah Arendt and the Humanities, chapter 4, ‘The World-Observer’ (available on SOLO) * Recommended: Hannah Arendt, preface to Between Past and Future

If you have any questions, please email Nicholas Gaskill, nicholas.gaskill@ell.ox.ac.uk.