Three Women in Dark Times: Edith Stein, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil
288Three Women in Dark Times: Edith Stein, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil
288Hardcover
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Overview
Following her subjects from 1933 to 1943, Sylvie Courtine-Denamy recounts how these three great philosophers of the twentieth century endeavored with profound moral commitment to address the issues confronting them. Condemned to exile, they not only sought to understand a horrible reality, but also attempted to make peace with 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. She explores each one's sense of her femininity, her position on the "woman question," and her relation to her Jewishness.
"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."
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780801435720 |
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Publisher: | Cornell University Press |
Publication date: | 10/17/2000 |
Series: | 12/18/2001 |
Pages: | 288 |
Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.06(d) |
Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments | xi | |
Prologue | 1 | |
Part I. | The Formative Years | |
Three Childhoods | 7 | |
Schooling and Teachers | 11 | |
"Amicus Plato, magis amica veritas" (Aristotle): Criticizing Their Teachers | 23 | |
Three Ways of Being a Woman | 35 | |
Amor Fati and the Fate of the Jews | 41 | |
Part II. | Commitment to the Things of This World (1933-1939) | |
1933 | 55 | |
1935 | 63 | |
1936 | 81 | |
1938 | 91 | |
1939 | 108 | |
Part III. | Exile (1940-1943) | |
1940 | 131 | |
1941 | 152 | |
1942 | 165 | |
1943 | 187 | |
Epilogue | 202 | |
Notes | 223 | |
Bibliography | 251 | |
Index | 263 |
What People are Saying About This
Courtine-Denamy sets them against the travail of Europe from 1933 to 1943... The treatment of each thinker individually, comparatively, and with respect to her understanding of this travail is striking, insightful and sophisticated but not meant to be comprehensive.
"In this engaging and absorbing bookSylvie Courtine-Denamy interweaves the stories of three extraordinary women who lived through the darkest period of the Twentieth Century. Each of them was born a Jew, but reacted in radically different ways to her Jewish background. Arendt positively affirmed herself as a Jew; Weil became a Christian but never joined the Church; Stein became a nun and died in Auschwitz. Each of them was extremely precocious and studied philosophy with some of the most distinguished philosophers of the time. After exploring their childhood and youth, Courtine-Denamy follows their destinies, year by year, from 1933 through 1943. A moving, passionate, and informative account of three women intellectuals confronting the Nazi horrors." —Richard J. Bernstein, New School for Social Research
Sylvie Courtine-Denamy's narrative of the intellectual, cultural, and political contributions of these extraordinary women situates their work within the rise of European totalitarianism and anti-Semitism, revealing not only their personal tragedies but also their outspoken courage on behalf of others and their enduring legacies as writers, teachers, and activists. Three Women in Dark Times is a compelling study of the darkest decades of the twentieth century.