Hannah Arendt’s phenomenology of plurality

With her key concept of plurality, Hannah Arendt did not only make an important contribution to political theory but also rethought the philosophical tradition she was coming from.

In this talk, Sophie Loidolt, Professor, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany, will show that Arendt’s famous notion of “the political,” far from corresponding to any ordinary notion of politics, must be elucidated as a phenomenology of plurality. In fact, many of the ideas that Arendt developed, not only her conceptualization of subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and world, but also her theorizing of a distinctly political we, can only be properly understood if one adopts a broad phenomenological perspective.