In this episode we talked with Roger Berkowitz, Professor of Political Studies and Human Rights, founder and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, and editor of the forthcoming book “The perils of invention” coming out on December with The University of Chicago Press. He is also author of The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition, co-editor of Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt's Denktagebuch (2017), Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics (2010), The Intellectual Origins of the Global Financial Crisis (2012), and editor of the annual journal HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center. His essay "Reconciling Oneself to the Impossibility of Reconciliation: Judgment and Worldliness in Hannah Arendt's Politics," has helped bring attention to the centrality of reconciliation in Hannah Arendt's work. Berkowitz is the 2019 recipient of the Hannah Arendt Award for Political Thought given by the Heinrich Böll Stiftung in Bremen, Germany.
The conversation was recorded live on October 28th 2021, when I discussed with Prof. Berkowitz about some themes of “The Perils of Invention”. The book is a collection of twelve essays based on talks originally given at three Hannah Arendt Center Conferences: “Human Being in an Inhuman Age,” “Lying and Politics,” and “Truthtelling: Democracy in an Age without Facts.” The authors have diverse backgrounds, providing us a boarder view of Arendt’s reflections in different aspects, making Arendt’s thinking accessible and potent. The main subject of the book are the questions about technology, lying and politics, the challenges we have now in face of technological advances affecting communication, the public and private spheres, life and the human condition.
