THE VISIONARIES: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil and the Salvation of Philosophy
by Wolfram Eilenberger (Allen Lane, $65 hb) is out now in ebook and in hardback on October 10.
“Simone Weil, born Jewish but profoundly inspired by Christianity, is the beating heart of the book.
Every era has its defining questions that animate the self and the world, and in the 20th century, such questions of philosophy in the Western world were forged against the backdrop of, and prompted by, war.
Living in a Manhattan apartment in 1943 and reflecting on her situation as a stateless Jewish refugee driven from Nazi Germany a decade before, Hannah Arendt, strident in speech, isolated from her peers and misunderstood by her fellow citizens, writes, “We lost our
