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Paulina Sosnowska: Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. Philosophy, Modernity, and Education. Lanham - Boulder - New York - London: Lexington Books. ISBN: 978-1-4985-8241-4.
UDC: 165.62Arendt H. Heidgger
The book Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, authored by the Polish philosopher Paulina Sosnowska, assistant professor at the Faculty of Education of the University of Warsaw, is a meticulously researched and engagingly written discussion of the relationship between two of the most intriguing thinkers of the turbulent 20th century, whose works to this date endure as a substantial source of philosophical inspiration, despite-and, indeed, because of-the circumstance of evoking sometimes diametrically opposed, mutually irreconcilable responses. Although the personal pathways of Arendt and Heidegger bear witness to a lifelong intimate bond, which was able to withstand-after the end of the love affair-the hiatus of the holocaust, their intellectual relation continually (r)evolved under the sign of the initial nonreciprocity: whereas the writings of Arendt reveal the careful, if (not) rather concealed efforts of a-paradoxically articulated-(n)ever un-faithful student, Heidegger as one of the formative university teachers scarcely, if (not) only covertly took notice of her coming-to-prominence, of her accomplishments. Instead of attempting to elaborate-upon the re-presented, pre-supposed background of the teacher's thought-the influence of Heidegger's hermeneutic phenomenology on the development of Arendt's political theory, Sosnowska-in a certain "reversal" of the pedagogical rapport (subtly indicated in the title)-re-traces, giving preference to the perspective of the student, seeking, through(out) Arendt's entire oeuvre, for underlying convergences and fundamental divergences, for in-commensurable in-congruences with Heidegger, but (thereby) avoiding also the potential pitfalls of a biographical "explanation" of the conceptual, the conditions (of possibility) for the philosophical dimension of the relationship between both authors, insofar as it, as already the subtitle of the study suggests, concerns the problematic of education within the modern-as well as the present-day (post-?modern?)-world.
Sosnowska, thus, takes the relation between Arendt and Heidegger- between their respective philosophical stances regarding the matters at hand- under consideration as a particular paradigm for a universally challenging re-questioning of the educational role of philosophy. However,...