Hannah Arendt, American philosopher and political scientist, was born in Hanover, Germany. In 1928 she completed her PhD under Karl Jaspers at the University of Heidelberg, having previously studied with Martin Heidegger at the University of Marburg. Upon immigrating to the United States in 1941, she became director of several Jewish organizations and served as chief editor of Schocken Books before being appointed to the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago in 1963. She taught at the New School for Social Research in New York from 1967 until her death.

The Influence of Heidegger and Phenomenology

Despite sharing Jaspers's views about the existential importance of communication, Arendt's philosophy mainly bears the imprint of Heidegger's phenomenology. Following Edmund Husserl, Heidegger argued that the scientific worldview conceals the genuine appearances of things as they are directly presented within lived experience. By abstracting from, and thereby concealing, the...