Thomas Meyer

“I don’t think there is any thinking process that is possible without personal experience. All thinking is after-thinking, after-thinking the thing.” (Hannah Arendt)

For Thomas Meyer, these sentences form the guiding principle of his biography of Hannah Arendt. He follows it as he uses new sources to trace and interpret her life and work from Königsberg to New York, from her dissertation on Augustine to her unfinished opus magnum The Life of the Mind. His biography illuminates the fascination and criticism that the person and her writings provoked throughout her life, and in the process makes the “Arendt” phenomenon more comprehensible to those interested in the subject as well as to those who know it.

Thomas Meyer is professor of philosophy at the LMU Munich. His research and publications focus on the 20th century. He has edited several of Hannah Arendt’s writings, including Wir Flüchtlinge (2015) and Die Freiheit, frei zu sein (2018).