David Arndt

What is politics? How is politics different from other spheres of human life? What is behind the debasement of political life today? This book argues that the most illuminating answers to these questions have come from Hannah Arendt. Arendt held that Western philosophy has never had a 'pure concept of the political', and that political philosophers have been guided and misguided by the assumptions implicit in their metaphysical questions. Her project was 'to look at politics … with eyes unclouded by philosophy', and to retrieve the non-theoretical understanding of politics implicit in ancient Greek literature and history. David Arndt's original and accessible study shows how Arendt reworked some of the basic concepts of political philosophy, which in turn led her to a re-interpretation of American political history and even to a profoundly original reading of the US Declaration of Independence.

Review of the climate science for severe convective storms, extreme precipitation, hurricanes and typhoons, and severe snowstorms and ice storms in the US shows that the ability to detect and attribute trends varies, depending on the phenomenon. A specific subset of extreme weather and climate types affecting the country is discussed to examine these extreme weather conditions. The categories of storms described were selected as they caused property damage and loss of life. The identification of an extreme occurrence was based on meteorological properties in place of the destructiveness. The primary purpose was to examine the scientific evidence for the prevailing capability to detect trends and understand their causes for certain weather types, including severe convective storms and hurricanes and typhoons.

This dissertation examines the question of foundations through close readings of four works: Martin Heidegger's The Origin of the Work of Art; Hannah Arendt's On Revolution; Michel Foucault's The Order of Things; and Wallace Stevens' "The Idea of Order at Key West." In particular, it focuses on the question of poiesis--the act of language through which things are first illuminated and made to appear as such. Each of the four works attempts to bring to light something fundamental that resists or eludes established concepts: Heidegger attempts to uncover a level of truth that lies unexperienced and unthought beneath the traditional conception of truth; Arendt tries to bring out a disjunction between theory and practice in the heritage of the American revolution; Foucault attempts to transform the history of ideas by bringing to light a stratum of discourse invisible to established modes of linguistic analysis; and in his poem Stevens tries to illuminate the enigmatic power that gives poetic language its force. At the same time, each work tries to account for this bringing-to-light itself--the poietic power of its own language. Consequently, all the works exhibit a paradoxically self-reflexive self-grounding structure. Each one offers itself as an example of the poietic act it describes. And each one can only justify or account for itself as an act of language on the grounds that it itself brings to light. For example, the Declaration offers itself as an example of the revolutionary act of foundation it describes in the principle of revolution, but it can only justify its own act of foundation on the basis of the principle of revolution it itself lays down. ;My aim in the dissertation is to construct a refined and rigorous concept of poiesis. I try to do this through a genuine reading of the works. Each reading tries to proceed through three steps: first, to turn the work's concepts or figures back on itself in order to understand it in its own terms; second, to locate the limits of the work's self-reflection, the point where the work cannot account in theory for what it is doing in practice; and third, to refine or transform the language of the text in order to bring to light what had been invisible within it. Such a reading would itself be an act of poiesis