In this lecture Professor Peg Birmingham will show how we could think with Hannah Arendt and feminist philosophy, specifically the work of Rosa Luxemburg, when addressing the most significant problem of our time: the climate catastrophe and the production of what the UN estimates are going to be 150 million climate refugees adding to the already 140 million forcibly displaced.
Following Arendt, this urgently calls for a new form of political solidarity. Birmingham will consider which new political principles are called for and how these would animate a new form of democracy. Inherent to questions of political solidarity is the question of plurality, which in turn raises questions about the limits of the political.
Lecture will be followed by a discussion with Professor Cathrine Holst (IFIKK, UiO) and Lifetime Government scholar Helgard Mahrdt (STK, UiO)
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About Peg Birmingham:
Birmingham is a leading expert on Hannah Arendt, and has engaged with Arendt’s thought on questions of human rights, radical evil, law, violence, political deception, and temporality.
In addition to Arendt, Birmingham has also worked extensively on modern and contemporary political thought, ethics, social philosophy and feminist philosophy. She is the author of Hannah Arendt and Human Rights (Indiana University Press, 2006), co-editor (with Anna Yeatman) of Aporia of Rights: Explorations in Citizenship in the Era of Human Rights (Bloomsbury, 2014), and co-editor (with Philippe van Haute) of Dissensus Communis: Between Ethics and Politics (Koros, 1995).
She is also the editor of Philosophy Today and co-editor (with Dimitris Vardoulakis) of the book series Incitements at Edinburgh University Press. The public lecture will be based on Birmingsham’s most recent book Hannah Arendt and Political Glory: Earthly Immortality in an Age of Superfluousness, published at Edinburgh University Press in 2025.