The Role of Kant’s “Schematism of the Pure Concepts of Understanding” in Hannah Arendt’s Theory of Judgment

Abstract

Never finished, Hannah Arendt's project The Life of the Mind was to include a third section, Judging. Indications of what she would have written can be culled from her lecture course: Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy. This essay examines the centrality of Kant's Schematism of the Pure Concepts of Understanding in Arendt's conception of judgment. Through this analysis, the central roles of imagination and communicability as they relate to judgment are examined. Further, the essay clarifies and emphasizes the importance of Arendt's insistence on distinction and specificity as they relate to conceptual analysis and thus to judgment.