Arendt and Augustine: More Than One Kind of Love

Although Hannah Arendt is not usually read as a philosopher of religion, her political philosophy is noticeably filled with references to religious figures and thinkers, including Jesus of Nazareth, Augustine and Duns Scotus. Also notable is the implicit centrality in her thought of amor mundi, or l...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Sophia
Main Author: Tatman, Lucy (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Springer Netherlands 2013
In: Sophia
Further subjects:B Augustine
B Love
B Hannah Arendt
B Amor Mundi
B World
Online Access: Volltext (lizenzpflichtig)
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Summary:Although Hannah Arendt is not usually read as a philosopher of religion, her political philosophy is noticeably filled with references to religious figures and thinkers, including Jesus of Nazareth, Augustine and Duns Scotus. Also notable is the implicit centrality in her thought of amor mundi, or love of the world. The difficulty is that although she spoke to her students about it, she rarely wrote about amor mundi. In this article, I seek to provide a plausible explanation of the meaning of amor mundi in Arendt’s thought, drawing in particular upon the influence of Augustine on Arendt’s unique development of the ethical and political principle of love for the world. Specifically, through a close reading of Arendt’s doctoral dissertation, Love and Saint Augustine, I identify the relationship between Augustine’s conception of cupiditas and Arendt’s conception of amor mundi.
ISSN:1873-930X
Contains:Enthalten in: Sophia
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1007/s11841-013-0363-3