The collection represents approximately 4,000 volumes, ephemera and pamphlets that made up the library in Hannah Arendt’s last apartment in New York City. Of particular significance are the 900+ volumes containing marginal notes or lining, endnotes or ephemera, as well as many volumes inscribed to her by Martin Heidegger, Gershom Scholem, W.H. Auden and Randall Jarrell, among others.

The hermeneutic circle (German: hermeneutischer Zirkel) describes the process of understanding a text hermeneutically. It refers to the idea that one's understanding of the text as a whole is established by reference to the individual parts and one's understanding of each individual part by reference to the whole. Neither the whole text nor any individual part can be understood without reference to one another, and hence, it is a circle. However, this circular character of interpretation does not make it impossible to interpret a text; rather, it stresses that the meaning of a text must be found within its cultural, historical, and literary context.

e book does not wholly succeed, but Jonas’s central idea ispowerful and has not been given the attention it deserves. !at ideaarises from one governing insight: Under technocratic modernity,“the altered nature of human action, with the magnitude andnovelty of its works and their impact on man’s global future, raisesmoral issues for which past ethics, geared to the dealings of manwith his fellow-men within narrow horizons of space and time, has