Dr. Samantha Fazekas

Samantha is a Teaching Fellow in Political Philosophy. She has taught at the Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany; Dublin City University; and Trinity College Dublin. Her research areas are in political and moral philosophy, Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy. She completed her Ph.D. at TCD in 2023. Her thesis justifies Hannah Arendt's appropriation of Immanuel Kant's aesthetic reflective judgment as a means for political decision-making.

  Kant (Theoretical and Practical Philosophy)   Moral Philosophy   Political Philosophy   Post-Kantian Philosophy

Samantha's research interests are in political and moral philosophy, Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy. She is currently preparing her Ph.D. thesis for publication. Her thesis develops a new reading of Hannah Arendt's interpretation of Immanuel Kant's aesthetic reflective judgment. The aim of this project is to justify Arendt's claim that she brings Kant's unwritten political philosophy to fruition by appropriating reflective judgment as a model for political judgment. The novelty of this project is that it situates reflective judgment in Arendt's political thought - without compromising the integrity of Kant's aesthetics or Arendt's conception of politics. By developing an Arendtian phenomenology of privacy, this project offers a new reading of Arendt's public-private distinction. It has the potential to square the formality of reflective judgment with the publicity and worldliness of political judgment. Samantha is also preparing two articles. The first article argues against the claim that Arendt should have turned to Aristotle's phronesis (practical wisdom) rather than Kant's reflective judgment as a model for political judgment. The second article demonstrates that Arendt's conception of political freedom is not only actualized through political speech and action, but also through the reflective activity of political judgment.