Suchergebnisse

The four short radio plays that Beckett wrote in the early 1960s – Rough for Radio I, Rough for Radio II, Cascando and Words and Music – each present us, expressionistically, with a fictional mind whose enclosing skull is the radio itself. Each mind engages in introspection for the sake of understanding itself better, but finds that inner self-knowledge must remain frustratingly elusive. Beckett invokes the work of two philosophers, Mauthner and Schopenhauer, and two major novelists, Joyce and Proust, to show us why the minds feel compelled to be introspective, and why their efforts at self-discovery are inevitably doomed to failure.

This essay examines Hannah Arendt's treatment of science and technology in her work during the 1950s and early 1960s. As scientific research acquired prominence in the United States and Germany after the Second World War, its public meaning was shaped by geopolitics and fears about nuclear weapons and the uncontrollable nature of technological development. A detailed exploration of the development of Arendt's thought in this context has not been undertaken before. This essay refines our understanding of Arendt's relationship with familiar interlocutors such as Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger, and challenges readings that concentrate narrowly on her analysis of totalitarianism as a reference point for understanding her thought.