Three Women in Dark Times: Edith Stein, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.39 (885 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0801487587 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 288 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2017-05-30 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Good "parallel lives" of these three women; some minor critiques of the translation Charles F. Hanes This is a very useful detailed description of the parallel lives of Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil and Edith Stein.I have known of Arendt for many years, and have read some of her works, and just recently encountered Simone Weil (I found a reference to her work "The Iliad or the Poem of Force"), and started obtaining some of her works. I had not previously known of Edith Stein and her works.For most of us today that did not experience the travails of the Jews in Europe starting in 1933, this book is eye-opening. Everyone knows about the concentration camps (Edith Stein died in Auschwitz), but we do. disappointing story of three remarkable women I am no philosopher, but have read the works of the three women who are the subjects of the book.I was hoping to put the three lives into the context of the intellectual and social world they lived in, and how and why they made their individual decisions on philosophy, religion, and their approach to the questions posed by both Nazism and the feminist movement.But little detail is given about the intellectual life. We are told the names of their mentors: but not any details of what these mentors taught (a major flaw for the non philosophy student who is not familiar with Heddiger etc.).At the s. A good intro to these ladies and their times Amazon Customer This is not an easy book. It is a glance into the lives of 3 women, Hanna Arendt, Simone Weil, and Edith Stein, each of Jewish descent and, in particular, at the response each one made to Nazism. There is a review of each woman's life and her career. A lot of space is given to the education of these women, which is especially interesting since each studied under some of the biggest names in philosophy in the 20th century. It is not easy to follow, however, unless you have some basic knowledge of Heidegger, Jaspers, Alain, Husserl. But it is still interesting. Each of these women chose a differe
She explores each one's sense of her femininity, her position on the "woman question," and her relation to her Jewishness. Condemned to exile, they not only sought to understand a horrible reality, but also attempted to make peace with it. "All three," the author writes, "are compelling figures who move us with their fierce desire to understand a world out of joint, reconcile it with itself, and, despite everything, love it.". To do so, Edith Stein and Simone Weil encouraged a stoic acceptance of necessity while Hannah Arendt argued for the capacity for renewal and the need to fight against the banality of evil.Courtine-Denamy also describes how as a student each woman caught the eye of her famous male teacher, yet dared to criticize and go beyond him. The dark years when the Nazis rose to power are here seen through the lives of Edith Stein, a disciple of Husserl and author of La science et la croix, who died in Auschwitz in 1942; Hannah Arendt, pupil of Heidegger and Jaspers and author of Eichmann in Jerusalem, who unhesitatingly responded to Hitler by making a personal commitment to Zionism; and Simone Weil, a student of Alain and author of La pesanteur et la grâce.Follo
What animates the comparison are stark differences overlaid on basic similarities: all three were Jews and philosophers, all were imperiled by the Nazi menace. A glossary of names and terms from French political life during the Nazi years would have enhanced this otherwise highly readable American edition of an originally French work. Stein, the traditional Catholic, accepted her Jewishness; Weil, the wayward gnostic who never converted to the Christianity she loved, did not. Weil, whose passions split between politics and religion, serves as linchpin for comparisons with the cloistered nun Stein and the fervently Zionist, eminently unmystical Arendt. . From Publishers Weekly The darkness of the decade 1933-1943 was at least partially illumined by the energetic syntheses of thought and action that Courtine-Denamy (Hannah Arendt) skillfully examines in th