Three Remarkable Women

For this Think Human Festival Open Lecture, three remarkable political thinkers of the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt, Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil are presented and discussed. Beverley Clack (Oxford Brookes, Philosophy), Gary Browning (Oxford Brookes, Politics) and Sasha Lawson-Frost (Durham, Philosophy) talk about how these women reacted to their turbulent times and framed radical thinking about politics based upon their life experience.

Arendt was a refugee from Nazi Germany, who acted as a journalist at the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem and wrote major works of political theory; Iris Murdoch worked in refugee camps in Europe at the end of the war, campaigned for the Communist Party and talked with major thinkers of the twentieth century, Simone Weil empathized with the suffering and the damned, worked in factories, mines and on the land, took part in the Spanish Civil War, spoke for the Resistance. She reflected on the concepts of attention, decreation and wrote a major work of political theory, The Need for Roots.

The actress Annette Badland will read extracts from the works of Murdoch, Arendt and Weil and the panel will discuss how politics today can reflect differing types of lived experience. Members of the audience will be invited to respond to the discussion and ask questions about politics and their own lived experience.