The Draw to Judgement

This website is dedicated to exploring philosophically and historically how we think, judge, and communicate our perceptions to others in complicated socio-poltical systems. No human being thinks or judges alone. That is Hannah Arendt's postulate in The Life of the Mind, personified as the "two-in-one dialogue." We think of this conversation as something Arendt had with herself, but her work is a subtle exploration of the mind's relationship to the body.

What happens when a 21st-century historian updates the physics behind Arendt's metaphysics of political oppression?

Studies in Systems Thinking

Yamamoto Isoroku--Under Construction

Germaine de Staël--Under Construction

What did it mean for Yamamoto to exercise judgement in devising the attack on Pearl Harbor, while privately harboring reservations about potential US soft power and political hegemony?

Germaine de Staël--Under Construction

How did political theorist Staël keep her head as women pushed for greater political participation during the French Revolution?

J. S. Bach--Under Construction

Germaine de Staël--Under Construction

J. S. Bach--Under Construction

When a hostile bureaucracy crosses the line into institutional cruelty, how does an artist-scholar balance an intellectual and spiritual calling against the realities of material survival for his family?

About the Author

Dr. R. T. Greenwald is a contemporary Philosopher-Historian. She takes a multi-disciplinary approach to Hannah Arendt's work on the relationship between political oppression and thoughtlessness. Greenwald's toolkit for examining the mechanics of totalizing systems includes historical training with strong background in literature, music, and the visual arts--a toolkit Arendt, a poet herself, might embrace in the 21st century. Greenwald received her doctorate in Modern European history with a specialization in National Socialism, the Shoah, and post-war Germany.