3 Matching Annotations
  1. Nov 2023
    1. The collection represents approximately 4,000 volumes, ephemera and pamphlets that made up the library in Hannah Arendt’s last apartment in New York City. Of particular significance are the 900+ volumes containing marginal notes or lining, endnotes or ephemera, as well as many volumes inscribed to her by Martin Heidegger, Gershom Scholem, W.H. Auden and Randall Jarrell, among others.
  2. Feb 2022
    1. The hermeneutic circle (German: hermeneutischer Zirkel) describes the process of understanding a text hermeneutically. It refers to the idea that one's understanding of the text as a whole is established by reference to the individual parts and one's understanding of each individual part by reference to the whole. Neither the whole text nor any individual part can be understood without reference to one another, and hence, it is a circle. However, this circular character of interpretation does not make it impossible to interpret a text; rather, it stresses that the meaning of a text must be found within its cultural, historical, and literary context.

      The hermeneutic circle is the idea that understanding a text in whole is underpinned by understanding its constituent parts and understanding the individual parts is underpinned by understanding the whole thereby making a circle of understanding. This understanding of a text is going to be heavily influenced by a text's cultural, historical, literary, and other contexts.

  3. Jul 2021
    1. e book does not wholly succeed, but Jonas’s central idea ispowerful and has not been given the attention it deserves. !at ideaarises from one governing insight: Under technocratic modernity,“the altered nature of human action, with the magnitude andnovelty of its works and their impact on man’s global future, raisesmoral issues for which past ethics, geared to the dealings of manwith his fellow-men within narrow horizons of space and time, has

      left us unprepared.” Although Heidegger found it necessary, in his attempt to rethink metaphysics, to go back to the insights of the pre-Socratic philosophers, Jonas does not believe that any earlier thinkers hold the key to the ethical challenge posed by technocratic modernity, because no previous society possessed powers that could extend its reach so far in both space and time. A wholly new ethics is required, and is required simply because of the scope of our technologies.

      Hans Jonas, a student of Martin Heidegger, argues in The Imperative of Responsibility, that modern technology requires a new ethical framework because no previous societies possessed the technical powers to extend their reach so far in time and space as ours currently do.