Women in Political Philosophy—Honoring Hannah Arendt’s Legacy

Žene u političkoj filozofiji—Očuvanje ostavštine Hannah Arendt

ABSTRACTS

Nadežda Čačinovič	Between Past and Future The impact of Hannah Arendt can be seen in a wide array of fields. The presentation wants to explore it from the viewpoint of the title: why does our past matter for our future? Is it just a trivial kind of causation? Do we have a choice?
Lara Oštarić	Kant’s Sensus Communis and Arendt’s Political Judgment Following the English and Scottish moral sense theorists, Kant in his third Critique, develops his own notion of common sense (sensus communis), the one that is grounded on his conception of pure aesthetic judgment. Sensus Communis for Kant is a ‘disinterested feeling of participation in humanity as a whole. One can experience this feeling provided that they occupy the universal standpoint of pure aesthetic judgment and not the personal standpoint of what one finds agreeable to oneself. I explore Hannah Arendt’s adoption of Kant’s aesthetic judgment and his notion of sensus communis for her own political philosophy.
Marita Brčić Kuljiš	The Idea of Participatory Equality in the Philosophy of H. Arendt The most famous quote mentioned in the context of H. Arendt’s philosophy is found in section IX. Chapter of the work The Origins of Totalitarianism under the title “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man”, where she states: “We are not born equal; we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights.” (1951: 301) Rejecting natural equality, Arendt rejects the idea of human rights based on their impracticability or impossibility of realization outside the political community. That is why it postulates equality as political equality, that is, as that which is articulated and recognized only in the political community. However, this approach raises several questions and ambiguities. In an attempt to explain to ourselves the foundation of equality when every form of metaphysical and pre-political features is removed, in this presentation, we will analyse certain aspects mentioned in the definition of equality H. Arendt. We will divide the presentation into several levels: a) We are not born equal – If we are not born equal, on what do we base our right to be equal? Are we born unequal? There is a key difference between equality and differences. b) …we become equal as members of a group – which group are we talking about, are we equal by being members of that group, or do we become equal when we become members of that group. What about individuals outside the group? This raises the question of rethinking the philosophy of migration. c) …. on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights – the key aspect of becoming equal is contained in the activity of a person who decides to recognize another equal to himself. Putting the above considerations into the context of a right to have rights and the right to belong to some kind of organized political community, we will try to explain how the idea of equality in the philosophy of H. Arendt can be understood primarily as the idea of participatory equality. The idea of participatory equality, or the individual’s constant awareness of personal responsibility towards equality, may be a protection against totalitarian demons.
Marija Brajdić Vuković Bojana Vignjević Korotaj Anita Dremel	Loving the World Enough to Act: Gendered Practices of Scholar-Activism in Science In The Human Condition and The Crisis in Education, Hannah Arendt urged us to “love the world enough to assume responsibility for it.” This paper takes that Arendtian imperative—amor mundi—as a lens for understanding gendered practices of scholar-activism in contemporary science. Rather than focusing on protest or collective mobilization, I explore the quieter, everyday forms of responsibility through which scholars sustain and renew the shared world of science. Drawing on phenomenological interviews with male and female scientists in Croatia across the natural, technical, biomedical, and social sciences, the paper examines how lived experience becomes a source of socially responsive research and practice. Male scientists often articulate responsibility in normative or procedural terms—compliance with standards, accuracy of data, and professional duty. Female scientists, by contrast, tend to recognize societal problems and are motivated to address them through their research—transforming care, mentoring, and responsiveness to social crises into guiding scientific values and project aims. These enactments exemplify what Arendt called action: the capacity to begin anew, to weave relations that sustain the world in common. Read alongside feminist epistemology (Haraway 1988; Harding 1991) and the ethics of epistemic repair (Fricker 2007), they reveal a gendered politics of care and renewal within scientific life. In this Arendtian sense, scholar-activism is not merely critique or resistance but the loving labor of maintaining a world worth inheriting. Recognizing such practices invites universities to rethink responsibility—not as compliance, but as a form of worldly love enacted through knowledge, relation, and care.
Natalie Nenadic	Thinking with Hannah Arendt about the Harms of AI Deepfake Pornography Thinking with Hannah Arendt about the Harms of AI Deepfake Pornography A feature of great thinkers is that they posit original conceptual frameworks that distinctively identify and illuminate a crisis of their time. These frameworks remain relevant beyond the time and circumstances that gave rise to them. Later thinkers, aiming similarly to address a crisis of their era, make creative use of these past frameworks in previously unimagined ways to help give conceptual voice to this contemporary crisis. I thus aim to address a dimension of the harms of today’s explosion of AI deepfake pornography, 99% of whose targets are female, through novel use of Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil.” This concept was born of completely different circumstances, namely the philosophical summons to grapple with the Holocaust. A central way that she responded to it was by identifying the role of modern technology in unprecedented mass harms and criminality. I begin by explaining Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil.” It identifies modern technology’s role in enabling a genocide of unprecedented reach through its capacity to array whole new swathes of the population into becoming perpetrators, indeed a new kind of perpetrator. For technology facilitated detachment from direct contact with the impact of this perpetrator’s actions. This enabled participation in criminality by many people who, for a variety of reasons, wouldn’t as readily participate in face-to-face, sadistic criminality. Next, I introduce what AI deepfake pornography is. Here, the perpetrator takes any picture of his victim — mainly teenaged girls, targeted by male classmates, and women in positions of power – and inserts it into an AI app, which integrates her image into mainstream pornography. Her likeness then becomes someone to whom every imaginable sexual abuse is done, with survivors describing the experience as life-shattering. These images and videos often end up on pornographic websites to which Google algorithms send traffic, generating revenue for both. I conclude by proposing how creatively to use the notion of the “banality of evil” to help us understand the nature and scale of this crisis. I summarize the insights of decades of feminist research on the sex-specific harms of earlier forms of technological pornography. I then show how this most powerful technology, AI, arrays whole new swathes of the population into becoming perpetrators, who effectuate pornography’s harms, while expanding the dragnet of female targets to an unprecedented scale.
Priyanka Jha	Reading Lying in Politics in Times of Manufacturing Consent in Populist Regimes: An Indian Feminist Exploration During these times, when one witnesses the rise of Populist Regimes globally, Hannah Arendt’s scholarship and contributions serve as a timely reminder of the necessity of public truths and telling the truth as a practice of caring for the World. Over the last two decades, the rise of Populist governments across the globe has been witnessed, leading to various crises, both formal and informal. The issues of humanitarian crises, forms of war and Conflict, Food Insecurity, Violation of Human Rights, Mass displacement, and others. Instead of resolving the root cause of such crises, the populist governments use lying, deceit and false information to deflect the masses from truth and create ways of ‘ manufacturing consensus’, Hannah Arendt’s arguments can be read and invoked as creating a framework of resistance and demand for the virtues and Integrity in Public Life. Taking reference to the famous ‘Lying in Politics’ by Hannah Arendt, the following questions will help us understand the key ideas that this presentation is interested in. 1. How does ‘ Public Truth’ come to be defined globally in contemporary times? 2. What is the nature of Public truth? Is it based on reality or Facts, which are driven by an expert mentality and data-driven technologies? 3. Are the Public Truths based on certain discursiveness, or are they socially constructed and motivated by the Populist Regimes? 4. What is the role of Public Truth in recovering Ethics, Morality and Integrity, crucial for the just and egalitarian human condition. From an Indian lens, this presentation is interested in probing the nature of “Public Truth” as constantly presented by the Government of India in the recent times when witnessed larger number of crises, whether in the form of the stampede in Kumbha (March 2025) or the altercation with Pakistan, known as Operation Sindoor (May 2025), the ongoing communal violence or the lynching of Dalit Man. By highlighting these moments, this presentation aims to probe the nature of the Public Truth as presented by the Government and public media in a certain way, in order to maintain its legitimacy, which is far from the truth. This presentation aims to bring Arendt’s analysis of the usage and misusage of Public Truth in contemporary Indian politics to understand the workings of a populist regime and its distance from ground realities and needs.
Ankica Čakardić	Humanity in Dark Times This presentation explores Hannah Arendt’s essay on Rosa Luxemburg from her 1968 collection Men in Dark Times. The analysis proceeds in three movements. First, it examines Arendt’s methodological approach—how and why she turned to biographical narrative as a way of illuminating political reality. Second, it traces the complicated legacy of Rosa Luxemburg herself: her periodic erasure and rediscovery and the layers of distortion that accumulated around her figure. Finally, it addresses a central tension in Arendt’s reading: her claim that Luxemburg’s revolutionary commitment was “primarily a moral matter,” and why this interpretation, despite its insights, fundamentally misunderstands Luxemburg’s relationship to Marxism. Throughout, the essay demonstrates how Arendt’s engagement with Luxemburg reveals as much about Arendt’s own political thought as it does about her subject—and perhaps something about our own dark times as well.
Keynote Maria Robaszkiewicz	Hannah Arendt 50 years later: Reflecting about the Multicrisis Today There are some concepts that bring us far in our reflective journey through Hannah Arendt’s work. They reappear every now and then, proving their continuous relevance in her thought. One of these central concepts is crisis. Arendt could aptly be described as a thinker of the crisis, or perhaps, rather, of multiple crises, as this motive is ever-present in her work. In her writings, she seems to be looking for crises, cracks in the fabric of the everyday that offer an opening, enabling individuals to appear before each other and become political actors. It is not that action necessarily needs a crisis, but a crisis definitely needs action. And for Arendt, a crisis is generally caused by a breach of the thread of tradition, when potential political actors are faced with a situation of uncertainty and a lack of commonly endorsed guidelines for action. At the same time, a crisis is a chance: it offers a vital impulse for free action to evolve in its utter form. With the breach of tradition, its categories cease to provide guidelines for action. In face of the current planetary multicrisis – climate change, wars in Middle East and Ukraine, the rise of populism and far right, worldwide migration practices – we need new ways of thinking, new political vocabulary, and new alliances to responsibly judge and act in the world. In this paper, I pose an important question about what crisis, considering the inflationary use of the term today, really means. Which events could rightly called a crisis and which still need more reflection and scrutiny? I argue that one of the reasons why academic and public interest in Arendt’s thinking is rapidly rising today is that so many politically acute challenges call not for dogmatic, but for critical and practical perspectives.
Boško Pešić	Amor mundi–istinski ljubiti svijet [Amor mundi–the True Love of the World] Hannah Arendt je vjerovala da svijet predstavlja onu vrst životnog prostora koji se može poboljšati i neprestano poboljšavati. Svjetovnost se, pritom napominje, iskazuje kao fenomen koji se rađa među ljudima, a ne unutar njih. U svjetovnosti ono političko ne proizlazi, dakle, iz „ljudske prirode“, nego iz međuljudskih odnosa i taj međuprostor – mjesto gdje ljudi povijesno djeluju i govore – jest izvor ljudske slobode. Međutim Arendt jednako tako upozorava da se suvremeni svijet više ne zna na takav način politički kretati. Njega uz to obilježava posvemašnji gubitak mjerila – nestanak univerzalnih vrijednosti i tradicije koja bi uobičajeno pružila orijentaciju. Takva se obilježja danas često tumače kao „katastrofa moralnog poretka“, no Arendt upozorava da je to katastrofa samo ukoliko prevlada uvjerenje da ljudi nisu u stanju samostalno prosuđivati. Ona odbacuje moralni pesimizam modernih teorija i zagovara aktivnu obnovu javnog područja. Svijet kao vremenski prostor za nju se time ispostavlja kao fundamentalni pojam pomoću kojeg se ono političko uopće može promišljati. Na tom tragu Arendt svijet najzad sagledava kao ontološki prostor slobode i pluralnosti, pri čemu se to političko pojavljuje među ljudima onda kada djeluju i govore jedni s drugima. Jednako tako kriza političkog nastat će kada ljudi djeluju i govore jedni protiv drugih, i prema Arendt, ta kriza nije tek moralna ni institucionalna, nego prvenstveno kriza svijeta koja se očituje kao svojevrsna prosudbena nesposobnost da zajednički mislimo, razlikujemo i stvaramo prostor slobodnog djelovanja. Dilema koju će izlaganje na koncu istaknuti razložit će se u kušnji odgovora na pitanja što znači istinski ljubiti takav svijet ili, tomu nasuprot, osjećati prokletstvo življenja u „uzbudljivim“ vremenima.
Željko Senković	Mišljenje i vrlina. Bilješka uz teze H. Arendt [Thinking and Virtue. A note to H. Arendt’s theses] Hannah Arendt našoj suvremenosti predstavlja možebitni misleni korektiv, nasuprot prevladavajućim apokaliptičkim tonovima postmodernih/hipermodernih/ili neokonzervativnih autora/ica, koji ističu svevlast tehnosfere ili se reduciraju na identiteske i nacionalne tematike. Premda inovativno tumačena, Arendt je danas sa svojim specifičnim humanističkim impetusom umnogome implicite negirana, jer ističe važnost javne sfere (koja je „space of freedom“) i poziva na odgovornost za svijet, koji jesmo. U izlaganju ću analizirati tekst „Europe and the Atom Bomb“ iz političke i etičke perspektive, a gdje autorica kontrastira (vojnu) tehnologiju i (zastarjelu) vrlinu hrabrosti. Ovaj kratki tekst svjedoči o Arendtičinoj originalnoj mislenosti i otvorenosti, što će se još jasnije pokazati kroz njenu tezu o mišljenju kao moći protiv zločinjenja (The Life of the Mind). Međutim, koliko god autoričino tumačenje zla bilo inspirativno i iskorakom u povijesnom i političkom mišljenju, ostaje pitanjem jesu li ovakva razmatranja na tragu klasične filozofije neoromantizmi ili njeni stavovi mogu (p)ostati epohalno relevantni.
Ana Maskalan	Budućnost kao politički prostor u filozofiji povijesti Hannah Arendt [The Future as a Political Space in the Philosophy of History of H. Arendt] U izlaganju ću se usredotočiti na one aspekte filozofije povijesti Hannah Arendt koji se odnose na njezino promišljanje budućnosti i čovjekova odnosa prema njoj. Posebnu ću pozornost posvetiti Arendtinom kritičkom odnosu prema teleološkom razumijevanju povijesti, koje pretpostavlja njezinu usmjerenost prema unaprijed zadanom cilju, te prema ideološki zatvorenim interpretacijama povijesnog tijeka. Arendt u takvom poimanju povijesti prepoznaje jedno od izvorišta političkih, ponajprije totalitarnih, katastrofa dvadesetog stoljeća. Nasuprot tomu, ona povijest razumijeva kao rezultat mreže ljudskih djelovanja kroz vrijeme, pri čemu ključnu ulogu ima čovjekova sposobnost započinjanja nečeg novog, pokretanja promjene (natalitet). U Arendtinoj filozofiji povijest time poprima obilježja otvorenosti i nepredvidivosti, dok je budućnost, kao krhki ishod ljudskog djelovanja u sadašnjosti, uvijek neodređena i nezadana. Mogućnost oblikovanja drukčije, bolje budućnosti Arendt stoga vidi u promišljenom i odgovornom djelovanju koje, oslobođeno naslijeđenih tragedija i ukorijenjenih struktura, obnavlja prostor ljudske slobode.
Ivana Skuhala Karasman Luka Boršić	Recepcija H. Arendt u Hrvatskoj [H. Arendt’s Reception in Croatia] Istraživanje filozofije Hannah Arendt u Hrvatskoj započeli su prilično kasno, gotovo dva desetljeća nakon njezine smrti 1975. godine. Prvi prijevod njezina kapitalnog djela Vita activa (The Human Condition) objavljen je 1991. godine, a prvi znanstveni članak o njezinu mišljenju tek 1999. godine. Od početka 2000-ih godina, osobito nakon 2010., bilježi se znatan porast interesa za Arendt, što se očituje u brojnim prijevodima, člancima, knjigama i akademskim radovima. Najvažnije hrvatske prevoditeljice njezinih djela su Mirjana Paić Jurinić i Nadežda Čačinovič, dok su najaktivniji izdavači Disput, Naklada Breza, TIM press te Jesenski i Turk. Na hrvatski jezik prevedena su gotovo sva njezina ključna djela, među kojima se ističu Eichmann u Jeruzalemu, Izvori totalitarizma, O zlu, Što je politika? i Ljudi u mračnim vremenima. Uz prijevode knjiga, u domaćim su časopisima objavljeni brojni Arendtini eseji i kraći tekstovi. Prvi filozof koji je u Hrvatskoj objavio članak o Arendt bio je Goran Gretić. Do danas je na hrvatskim sveučilištima obranjeno više završnih, diplomskih i magistarskih radova o Arendt, najviše na Sveučilištu Josipa Jurja Strossmayera u Osijeku. Ukupno gledano, Hannah Arendt postala je najprevođenija i najistraživanija filozofkinja u Hrvatskoj. Razlog tomu leži u njezinoj aktualnoj političko-filozofskoj misli, univerzalnim temama odgovornosti i zla te kompleksnom intelektualnom nasljeđu koje i dalje potiče nova tumačenja.
Šeherezada Đafić	Doprinos filozofkinja iz Bosne i Hercegovine razvoju neomodernističke etičke i političke misli [The Contribution of Women Philosophers from Bosnia and Herzegovina to the Development of Neomodernist Ethical and Political Thought] Ovaj rad istražuje doprinos žena filozofkinja u Bosni i Hercegovini razvoju neomodernističe političke i etičke misli. Polazeći od univerzalnog naslijeđa filozofkinja poput Christine de Pizan i Hanne Arendt, rad se fokusira na savremene bosanskohercegovačke misliteljice: Amilu Buturović, Zilhu Mastalić-Košuta, Lejlu Mušić i Šejlu Šehabović, koje propituju pitanja slobode, odgovornosti i javnog djelovanja u kontekstu postratnog i tranzicijskog društva. Analiza pokazuje kako ove autorice, kroz interdisciplinarni pristup, afirmiraju filozofiju kao prostor ženskog subjektiviteta i društvene transformacije. U svjetlu Arendtine ideje vita activa, rad razmatra načine na koje ženska filozofska misao u Bosni i Hercegovini otvara mogućnost novih početaka, etičkog promišljanja i političkog djelovanja utemeljenog na neomodernističkim idejama.