PhilAnon Meeting

Good Day,

This week's discussion will be based around Hannah Arendt's conception of loneliness and it's negative social and political consequences. Please see the Aeon article here. I hope you will join us on the Phil Anon Discord at 12:00 on Wednesday.

Samantha Rose Hill is the assistant director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, visiting assistant professor of politics at Bard College in New York and associate faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research in New York City. Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was a political theorist and German Jewish emigre to the United States who studied, among other things, the causes of totalitarianism in government and evil in people.

Arendt wrote "What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century." In the exigent conditions of pandemic, when physical and social distancing is a critical tool for preventing the transmission of disease and as traditional forms of community experience precipitous declines in participation, how can we gird ourselves and our societies against the scourges of loneliness?

Please let me know if you need any help getting access to the Discord.

Best,

-Quinlan Murphy