Place
New York
The city where Hannah Arendt taught at the New School, where she wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism in a small apartment, and where the republic of letters she helped build still meets.
New York is not a city of philosophy seminars, but it has absorbed philosophers in exile and given them scope. Hannah Arendt arrived in 1941, stateless and newly escaped from Gurs internment camp in France, and spent the rest of her life in the city: writing at the New School for Social Research, arguing with the Jewish intellectuals of the New York Review of Books, and covering the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem as its New York correspondent. The Origins of Totalitarianism was written in New York. The Human Condition was thought through here. The city's combination of refugee density and intellectual intensity suited someone whose deepest subject was what it means to belong.
Thinkers Connected to New York
William James
He began as a medical student, became a psychologist, and ended as a philosopher, because the questions kept escaping the disciplines.
Hannah Arendt
She watched a Nazi bureaucrat testify at his trial and understood something terrible: evil does not require monsters.
Martha Nussbaum
She argues that a just society must ask not only who has how much, but what people can actually do and be.
Judith Butler
She argued that gender is not what you are but what you do, and that doing it differently is where freedom begins.
Kwame Anthony Appiah
He argues that you can be rooted in a particular place and people while remaining a citizen of the whole world, and that these are not in tension.
David Chalmers
He named the hard problem of consciousness, why physical processes feel like anything at all, and no one has solved it yet.
John Dewey
He argued that ideas are tools for solving real problems rather than mirrors of eternal truth, and spent a long public career trying to rebuild education and democracy on that basis.
Thomas Nagel
He asked what it is like to be a bat, and argued that no matter how much you learn about a bat's brain from the outside, you will never capture the one thing that matters most: what the experience feels like from within.
Richard Rorty
He argued that philosophy should give up hunting for certain foundations beneath our beliefs, and instead treat truth as whatever survives an open, ongoing conversation among free people.