The Life of the Mind
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Narrated by:
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Laural Merlington
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By:
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Hannah Arendt
About this listen
Considered by many to be Hannah Arendt's greatest work, published as she neared the end of her life, The Life of the Mind investigates thought itself, as it exists in contemplative life. In a shift from her previous writings, most of which focus on the world outside the mind, this work was planned as three volumes that would explore the activities of the mind considered by Arendt to be fundamental. What emerged is a rich, challenging analysis of human mental activity, considered in terms of thinking, willing, and judging.
This final achievement, presented here in a complete one-volume edition, may be seen as a legacy to our own and future generations.
©1971 Hannah Arendt; copyright 1977, 1978 by Harcourt, Inc. (P)2018 TantorListeners also enjoyed...
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James V. Schall is a treasure of the Catholic intellectual tradition. A prolific author and essayist, Schall readily connects with his readers on sundry topics from war to friendship, philosophy, politics, and to ordinary everyday living. In his newest work, The Mind That Is Catholic, he presents a retrospective collection of his academic and literary essays written in the past 50 years.
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Profound Insights
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Martin Heidegger
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With characteristic lucidity and style, Steiner makes Heidegger's immensely difficult body of work accessible to the general reader. In a new introduction, Steiner addresses language and philosophy and the rise of Nazism. "It would be hard to imagine a better introduction to the work of philosopher Martin Heidegger." (George Kateb, The New Republic)
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Where is Heidegger on audible?!
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The Givenness of Things
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The spirit of our times can appear to be one of joyless urgency. As a culture we have become less interested in the exploration of the glorious mind, and more interested in creating and mastering technologies that will yield material well-being. But while cultural pessimism is always fashionable, there is still much to give us hope.
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Mostly thoughts on religious things
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The Portable Atheist
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Christopher Hitchens continues to make the case for a splendidly godless universe in this first-ever gathering of the influential voices past and present that have shaped his side of the current (and raging) God/no-god debate. With Hitchens as your erudite and witty guide, you'll be led through a wealth of philosophy, literature, and scientific inquiry, including generous portions of the words of Lucretius, Benedict de Spinoza, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Mark Twain, and more.
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This is ABRIDGED
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In The Soul of the World, renowned philosopher Roger Scruton defends the experience of the sacred against today’s fashionable forms of atheism. He argues that our personal relationships, moral intuitions, and aesthetic judgments hint at a transcendent dimension that cannot be understood through the lens of science alone. To be fully alive - and to understand what we are - is to acknowledge the reality of sacred things.
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"Against Reductionism"
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The Meaning of Happiness
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Deep down, most people think that happiness comes from having or doing something. Here, in Alan Watts’s groundbreaking third book (originally published in 1940), he offers a more challenging thesis: authentic happiness comes from embracing life as a whole in all its contradictions and paradoxes, an attitude that Watts calls the “way of acceptance.” Drawing on Eastern philosophy, Western mysticism, and analytic psychology, Watts demonstrates that happiness comes from accepting both the outer world around us and the inner world inside us,
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Good Concepts Hard to Follow Along
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Philosophy: 100 Essential Thinkers
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This engaging and accessible book invites the listener to explore the questions and arguments of philosophy through the work of 100 of the greatest thinkers within the Western intellectual tradition - covering philosophical, scientific, political, and religious thought over a period of 2500 years.
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Unpretentious, honest, with a big picture
- By Mike S. on 05-29-17
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An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
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John Locke and his works - particularly An Essay Concerning Human Understanding - are regularly and rightly presented as foundations for the Age of Enlightenment. His primary epistemological message - that the mind at birth is a blank sheet waiting to be filled by the experiences of the senses - complemented his primary political message: that human beings are free and equal and have the right to envision, create and direct the governments that rule them and the societies within which they live.
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Exhaustive Philosophic Treatise
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A Short History of Ethics
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A Short History of Ethics is a significant contribution written by one of the most important living philosophers. It remains an important work, ideal for all students interested in ethics and morality.
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Great philosopher made ridiculous by accents
- By Olivia Walling on 10-04-17
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Psychotherapy East and West
- By: Alan Watts
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Alan Watts examines the problem of humans in a seemingly hostile universe in ways that question the social norms and illusions that bind and constrict modern humans. Marking a groundbreaking synthesis, Watts asserts that the powerful insights of Freud and Jung, which had, indeed, brought psychiatry close to the edge of liberation, could, if melded with the hitherto secret wisdom of the Eastern traditions, free people from their battles with the self.
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Not what I have come to expect from Alan Watts works
- By Shiva Latchmipersad on 03-22-19
By: Alan Watts
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This Very Short Introduction explores the philosophical ideas and political theories belonging to one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. As a survivor of the Holocaust, Arendt's life informed her work exploring the meaning and construction of power, evil, totalitarianism, and direct democracy. Dana Villa explains how Arendt gained world-wide fame with the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism, and went on to have a distinguished career as a political theorist and public intellectual.
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Brilliant: both Arendt and this introductory work
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This book is amazing
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Easy to follow, better than today's fluff
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Paris is firing all its ammunition into the August night. Against a vast backdrop of water and stone, on both sides of a river awash with history, freedom’s barricades are once again being erected. Once again justice must be redeemed with men’s blood. Albert Camus (1913-1960) wrote these words in August 1944, as Paris was being liberated from German occupation. Although best known for his novels including The Stranger and The Plague, it was his vivid descriptions of the horrors of the occupation and his passionate defense of freedom that in fact launched his public fame.
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Incompleteness
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drones on and on for hours!
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Rahel Varnhagen
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Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman is the biography of a remarkable, complicated, troubled, passionate woman, an important figure in German romanticism, the person who in a sense founded the Goethe cult that would become central to German cultural life in the 19th century, as well as someone who confronted with unusual determination and bore the burden of being both a woman in a man's world and an assimilated Jew in Germany.
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Interesante!
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By: Hannah Arendt, and others
What listeners say about The Life of the Mind
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- Anonymous User
- 06-22-21
love the book, Hannah is a master.
but listen to it at 1.5x speed and thank me later. apparently the pronunciations and accents are atrocious, but she said Husserl in a way that made me laugh, so she's alright by my measure.
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- Richard B.
- 07-30-20
Thought-provoking and well-executed
I'm very happy that Arendt's last work is available as an audiobook. It gave me a chance to "prelisten" to the book as a whole before focusing on particular places with a print version. Laural Merlington does an excellent job overall, and just has some trouble with pronunciation of German and Latin. It would be a tall order, I think, to expect her to read fluently not only English and French, but also German, Latin, and Ancient Greek that come up throughout the book.
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- AttackGirl
- 09-10-23
Well Read, Articulate and Expressive
I enjoyed this book, reading several times over the last few weeks and thinking about all the authors I have read and she has read of people who think and those surrounding them who take their work and try to publish what they think they must mean and as in the end she discusses how that work as they find the empty page and try to assemble words and ideas here and there and I am reminded even until know one still understands Hitlers Meanings in his book, in his speech’s, his writings because he was very well read. So when does society decided whom to publish and who not too. As Hannah discusses Nietzsche did not write Will to Power but didn’t mention that his sister did and in those writings are changes in meaning, understanding even from as she discusses KJV to who knows what. Many times I find in my daily discussions I say things that no one understands because they do not read which you to will find once you start reading more and more. Do you know that the whole world was deceived and I ask you to think why do NOT virus’s jump species, which is BIO 101, and yet the whole world was believing the Wuhan Blood mixture caused …. READ MORE! READ MORE, READ and educated yourselves and THINK on what you read.
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- Gary
- 11-08-18
Being is more interesting than Nothing
I love an author who assumes the reader really wants to understand. In the end there is no more interesting topic than 'Being'. There's been a 2500 year conversation going on among incredibly smart people concerning Being, and Hannah Arendt summarizes and amplifies that conversation and this book allows people like me to peek in on what really smart people think about the topic.
Parmenides starts the conversation when he rejects 'nothing', makes the all the 'one', and equates Being as thinking. Heraclitus makes Being as becoming (he's the one who says you never cross the same river once). Arendt leans towards Being as thinking and even states that she is not interested in Being as knowledge in the style of Titus Lucretius (he wrote my favorite book, 'On the Nature of Things').
Arendt will say she is not a philosopher. She does not want to interpret the world by thinking about it; she wants to experience the world and shape it. Overall, this book read like a series of Great Courses on Western Philosophy throughout the ages, but with a tight narrative provided by a brilliant explicator.
Most of my favorite authors are mentioned in this book: Kant, Wittgenstein, Plato, Aristotle, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Hegel, Aquinas, Augustine, Spinoza, Plotinus, Lucretius, Thucydides, Herodotus, Bergson (she really likes Bergson and his 'lived time', I haven't actually read Bergson, but I have read 'The Physicist and the Philosopher' available on Audible), Husserl and so on. For each of the authors mentioned Arendt provides the context, the relevance and the connections necessary for her explications. One does not need to have had read those authors in order to follow what she is saying because she always seems to respect the intelligence of her reader and gives them just enough for them to follow the discourse.
Her second volume in this set is on Will. What does 'Will' even mean? She'll tell you. She'll make all the connections. She'll show how Schopenhauer makes Being as Will; after all, his book is titled 'Will and Representation as Idea' for a reason and Nietzsche will tweak it into 'will to power' and relate the last man standing and 'the eternal recurrence of the same' into Being as Will too. She does mention Spinoza in the story but doesn't explicitly state his 'conatus' (striving) as the Will immanent within everything as the 'one' substance of the universe making everything in the universe necessary but I think most readers will get the connection on their own.
She definitely favors the 'faculty of choice' for Will in the manner of Duns Scotus even at the price of contingency. A contingent world is not a necessary world; a necessary world is a world where time and chance determine ones fate through Grace alone. Gratitude and Socratic wonder give us our Will, at least Arendt says Scotus argues that contra Aquinas.
Augustine reworks St. Paul's 'salvation through faith not works' and brings in the Pagan metaphysics of Plotinus and defines the middle ages until St. Thomas Aquinas comes along and gets enshrined within Dante's 'Divine Comedy' while both leverage off of Aristotle who makes contemplation (thinking) of the divine the ultimate good and our ultimate purpose. Duns Scotus will politely disagree.
Arendt pointed out something to me that I had never connected previously by her quoting Jesus saying that we are not to be good since God is good alone, but rather we should think well ('if you so much as look at a woman with lust in your heart you have committed adultery') and behave properly ('do unto others'). All of this stuff is laid out in this book so that anyone can follow the multiple trains of thought as she lays them out.
She captures the essence of Nietzsche and Heidegger in relatively long sections of the book in such a way that any reader of this book who hasn't read them will want to read them. She said that Heidegger did not mention Nietzsche in 'Being and Time' by name. As Arendt says, in B and T Heidegger makes 'care' (German: Sorge) and its reliance on the future as filtered through our understanding of the past through our now the ontological foundation for Being (btw, Arendt explains Nietzsche and his 'Eternal Recurrence of the same' with the same temporal formulation; after Heidegger makes his 'turn' between his volume I and II of 'Nietzsche' as Arendt correctly points out he'll change 'care' to 'will' for the ontological foundation for Being, also his 'turn' involved changing the presumption inherent in the very fact that we are asking about the meaning of Being from Being as meaning since the posing of the question gives Being a foundation within itself ('a hermeneutical circle' of sorts).
At times, I felt that this book was as if I were listening to a great college professor who was giving a series of lectures that would stay with the student for life but all the while knowing I didn't have to take a test, and besides who among us don't love detailed explications of Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason' or Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Mind'? I know I do, and if you do too you'll find this book as extraordinary as I did, and I would recommend you listen to 'The Bernstein Tapes' of each book freely available off the net.
The best way to see this book is as a review and explication of a 2500 year old conversation that has been going in the background of most peoples' lives involving some great thinkers and Arendt wants her readers to understanding why it is just as relevant today has it always has been. Our meaning and purpose are determined by what we believe to be true (Being=thinking) and how we believe we should act (Being=will), and this book will put each into understandable terms.
A bracketed aside: [I thought she was wrong when she said that Nietzsche's inversion of Plato was a return to Plato. She says that because she really doesn't like what she labels as nihilism and any part of Nietzsche or Heidegger that flirted with that she was going to be negative towards for obvious reasons (see her book 'The Origins of Totalitarianism' for clarification). I've been concurrently reading 'Heidegger: Thought and Historicity' by Christopher Fynsk and he seemed to think similarly as I did regarding Nietzsche's inversion of Plato. He actually also footnoted this book and cited Arendt to be the first to notice the tonal difference between Vol I and II of Heidegger's 'Nietzsche'. I noticed Arendt generously gave credit to somebody else within this book while the footnote in his book did not].
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24 people found this helpful
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- Andrew
- 06-14-20
High quality
Arendt's work is, like any good thinking, complex and worthy of serious consideration. The performer takes on the challenge and meets the demands for personality without performance nicely. One of my favorite audio books.
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- SelfishWizard
- 01-20-20
A great book marred by shockingly poor narration
Hannah Arendt is one of the great German intellectuals of the 20th century and this is a wonderful introduction to her thought.
But I suggest reading it in book form rather than this audible version.
The narrator is unused to philosophical material, cannot pronounce the names of some of the world's great philosophers and is incapable of pronouncing non-English words in a comprehensible fashion. Heidegger is pronounced as "Hydecker", Paul Valery becomes Paul Velery (rhymes with celery) and the introductory quotes to each chapter in French, German and Latin are butchered completely beyond comprehension for a speaker of those languages. It is shocking that this could happen to such an important book.
Audible should re-record the foreign language parts with a narrator who can pronounce the words properly, preferably someone who speaks both German and French. This recording is potentially damaging to the reputation of all involved and I am sorry to say should be promptly corrected without regard to cost.
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15 people found this helpful
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- Placeholder
- 09-22-23
Excellent Read ..
excellent book and reading . .classy intellectual and historical while informative . Seriously considering reading again But will more then likely move on to her “human condition”
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- Jeff Lacy
- 06-12-19
Need a better reader
An enlightening and challenging read but fulfilling. The reader, however, though deliberate and clear overall, could have been better at her Latin and German. This weakness was a distraction throughout. But I would rather have an Audible of this book than none at all. This narration was good enough to be helpful.
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11 people found this helpful
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- mss y
- 06-04-22
Believe the reviewers about terrible reader
The narrator's non English pronunciation is so terrible as to be distracting. It is unbelievable that this performer was chosen to read Hannah Arendt, who is known for so many non English quotes and texts in her writing.
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- Jase G
- 09-02-22
A good read, if you've the patience
Hannah Arendt is the only philosopher whose writing I enjoy who takes a irrational approach that reminds me of the continentals. Her prose is dense, but beautiful. Unfortunately, it's also a little bit meandering, and sometimes a bit self-contradictory.
Still, I think the book is worth reading, if you have the patience to put it through the mental sieve to find the gems. I find most of it does slip through, and most of the gems are near the beginning.
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