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Article: Arendt's observations and thoughts on ethical questions.(Critical essay)
- Article from:
- Social Research
- Article date:
- September 22, 2007
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2007 New School for Social Research. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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HANNAH ARENDT WROTE THAT AFTER AUSCHWITZ "THE PROBLEM of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe," just as death became the fundamental question after World War I (Arendt, 1994b: 134). * The extent to which this assertion went against the grain of the dominant philosophical discipline of "ethics" can be judged by a recently published book by Wilhelm Vossenkuhl (2006), professor of philosophy at the University of Munich, entitled The Possibility of the Good: Ethics in the 21st Century. The first sentence reads: "All questions of ethics are accompanied by two closely related questions: what is the good, and how is it possible to achieve ...