Glossary

This page is a stub for a glossary I plan to write for the key terms in the philosophy of Hannah Arendt. It is meant as a resource for readers of my series of articles about Lacanian psychoanalysis and free speech.

Beginning with the ninth article in that series, certain words and phrases in the text are underlined whenever they are used in a specific sense that differs from their everyday meanings. In most cases, the specific sense is that which Hannah Arendt assigns to them; in the rest, the sense is directly inspired by Arendt’s usage. Since my articles are published on Medium, which indicates hyperlinks by underlining, the underlined words are also hyperlinks that will take you to this glossary.

Conversely, when I don’t underline a term that is defined in this glossary, I am using the word in its everyday sense. For example, when I talk about private property, the fact that the phrase is underlined means that I have in mind the particular sense in which Arendt uses it. By contrast, when I use the phrase private property without underlining it, I am most definitely not using it in the specific way that Arendt does, but in the commonly understood sense of the term as it is generally used today, and which may be found in any good dictionary.