Philosophy

This course examines Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity. Through a close reading of these texts, the class will look at how both Arendt and de Beauvoir explore the politics of hate. Coming to their investigations via the European experience of mechanized mass murder and the routine events of terror and evil during World War II, these philosophers attempt to speak not only to their own generation but to ours as well.