University of Pennsylvania Press
Thinking in Public: Strauss, Levinas, Arendt
Key Metrics
- Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Hardcover
- 9780812247848
- 9.2 X 6.1 X 1 inches
- 1.3 pounds
- Philosophy > Political
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
Long before we began to speak of public intellectuals, the ideas of the public and the intellectual raised consternation among many European philosophers and political theorists. Thinking in Public examines the ambivalence these linked ideas provoked in the generation of European Jewish thinkers born around 1900. By comparing the lives and works of Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, and Leo Strauss, who grew up in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair and studied with the philosopher--and sometime National Socialist--Martin Heidegger, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft offers a strikingly new perspective on the relationship between philosophers and politics.
Rather than celebrate or condemn the figure of the intellectual, Wurgaft argues that the stories we tell about intellectuals and their publics are useful barometers of our political hopes and fears. What ideas about philosophy itself, and about the public's capacity for reasoned discussion, are contained in these stories? And what work do we think philosophers and other thinkers can and should accomplish in the world beyond the classroom? The differences between Arendt, Levinas, and Strauss were great, but Wurgaft shows that all three came to believe that the question of the social role of the philosopher was the question of their century. The figure of the intellectual was not an ideal to be emulated but rather a provocation inviting these three thinkers to ask whether truth and politics could ever be harmonized, whether philosophy was a fundamentally worldly or unworldly practice.
Author Bio
I’m a writer and historian. The topics of my books, essays, and criticism range from the history of philosophy to contemporary food culture, with stops along the way for coffee and the history of the cafe, the history of colleges and universities, and laboratory-grown meat and the future of food. I received my B.A. from Swarthmore College, and my M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. I’ve been a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the New School for Social Research, a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at MIT, and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Wesleyan University. I believe in public scholarship (carefully researched work accessible to the general reader) and I place my trust in the essay form.
I write and edit freelance, and sometimes consult for individuals and organizations that need to think critically about the past (i.e., institutional history) or the future (i.e., emerging food technologies).
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