Thinking and action in Hannah Arendt

Abstract

This paper intends to investigate in Hannah Arendt's last work The Life of the Mind the relationship between thinking and action, which is in the origin of the conflict between philosophy and politics and has influenced the whole philosophical tradition. Arendt aims to show that these two activities are not by themselves incompatible with each other, as this tradition made efforts to establish, but they have become so through the "professional" philosophical use of thinking.