Arendt, Augustine, and the New Beginning: The Action Theory and Moral Thought of Hannah Arendt in the Light of Her Dissertation on St. Augustine

摘要

Kampowski's first two chapters are devoted to a biographical account (with a certain emphasis on her intimacy with Heidegger and her Jewishness) as well as to a survey of her chief works and a review of the textual and translational difficulties, together with her own doubts regarding the dissertation. According to Arendt, Augustine is "the first philosopher of the will" (p. 146), since the Greeks did not have our notion of this faculty as futuredirected spontaneity, that is, as radical origination of action, or more precisely, as change undetermined by prior causes.