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Professor Helga Varden, University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, Department of Philosophy, will introduce on the following topic:
Kant and Political Evil
Professor Vardens paper is based on her article ‘Kant and Arendt on Barbaric and Totalitarian Evil’ (2021 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. cxxi, Part 2, doi: 10.1093/arisoc/aoab002). She will start by sketching Kant’s four ideal legal and political conditions—'anarchy,’ ‘despotism,’ ‘republic,’ and ‘barbarism’—before showing their usefulness for analyzing different political forces that may operate in any given society. Contrary to the common tendency in political philosophy to view societies as either in the so-called ‘state of nature’ (‘anarchy’) or in ‘civil society’ (‘republic’), she proposes that we might find ourselves in societies where aspects or ‘pockets’ of our lives are subject to any one of these (anarchic, despotic, republican, and barbaric) political forces. She then combines Kant’s ideas on barbaric evil with Arendt’s ideas on totalitarian evil, which gives us a four-fold conception of political evil. This fourfold distinction is then used to identify some types and patterns of destructive political forces as they occur in actual, historical societies, such as racist, sexist, or heterosexist violence and oppression.
Commentator: Professor Sven Arntzen
The meeting will take place in ‘Castbergs bibliotek’, 3. floor, Domus Bibliotheca, Faculty of Law, Karl Johans gate 47. It is arranged in cooperation with the University of Oslo, Faculty of Law, Department of Public and International Law.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
University of Oslo Law School, Nationaltheatret, Oslo, Norway