Helga Varden is Professor of Philosophy and Gender and Women Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has held visiting positions at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and the University of St. Andrews, and she is an executive editor of the Journal of Canadian Philosophy. Her main research interests are Kant’s practical philosophy, legal-political philosophy and its history, feminist philosophy, and the philosophy of sex and love. In addition to her Sex, Love, and Gender: A Kantian Theory (Oxford University Press, 2020), Varden has published many articles on a range of classical philosophical issues including Kant’s answer to the murderer at the door, private property, care relations, political obligations, and political legitimacy, as well as on applied issues such as privacy, poverty, non-human animals, and terrorism. The talk delivered here—“Kant and Arendt on Barbaric and Totalitarian Evil”—on how theorize political evil, points both backward to a theme running through Sex, Love, and Gender and forward to a central theme in her new book project on Kant’s transformation of the social contract tradition.

This podcast is an audio recording of Professor Varden's talk - 'Kant and Arendt on Barbaric and Totalitarian Evil' - at the Aristotelian Society on 22 March 2021. The recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.