The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt's final work, unfinished at her death, examines three activities of the mind: thinking, willing and judging. It grew out of her Gifford Lectures in Aberdeen, which she was the first woman to deliver, and her courses on thinking, the will and Kant's Critique of Judgment. Her interest had sharpened with Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she tied thoughtlessness to evil. In the part on thinking she leans on Socrates and his idea of thought as a solitary dialogue with oneself. Only Thinking and Willing were finished; the first page of Judging was still in her typewriter when she died, and her friend Mary McCarthy edited the two completed parts, joined here in one volume.

A What CEOs are reading feature listed it as a book read by Mobile Telephone Networks chief executive Phuthuma Nhleko.