Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0009-0002-3873-1784

Date Available

8-20-2025

Year of Publication

2025

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College

Arts and Sciences

Department/School/Program

Philosophy

Faculty

Dr. Natalie Nenadic

Faculty

Dr. Gregory Fried

Faculty

Dr. Arnold Farr

Abstract

I argue that Hannah Arendt practiced hermeneutic phenomenology in the canonical mode of her mentor, Martin Heidegger. Hermeneutic phenomenology is not a philosophical school defined by methods, results, or topics. It is a practice of transformative thinking by which we work through the burdens of who and how we have been towards the possibilities of who and how we could be. Heidegger, burdened by the scientism of his philosophical milieu, articulated this practice not by rejecting scientistic philosophies outright but by interpretively recovering their most promising tendencies.

Though seldom recognized as a hermeneutic phenomenologist, Arendt’s philosophical response to Nazism reveals her as one. Profoundly burdened by the death camps, she insisted that their “real story” was “desperately needed for the future.” In Heideggerian fashion, Arendt told her part of that real story not by dismissing the philosophical tradition for lacking a concept of totalitarian radical evil but by interpretively recovering fragmentary insights from it.

I conclude with Arendt’s concept of natality, the possibility corresponding to the burden of totalitarian radical evil. Arendt’s natality, I suggest, further articulates Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology by showing that we work through burdens towards possibilities from two different “existential positions”: thinking and action.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.13023/etd.2025.433

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