European University Institute Library

Thinking in public, Strauss, Levinas, Arendt, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

index present

non fiction

Thinking in public

bibliography

917377062

Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft

Intellectual history of the modern age

Strauss, Levinas, Arendt

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?--Book jacket