In this work I examine the role of judgment in the writings of Hannah Arendt. I argue that consideration of this concept helps to shed light on her important contribution to political philosophy, and in particular on the often overlooked radical aspects of her work. Judgment lies at the heart of a cluster of characteristically ‘Arendtian’ themes: those of natality, plurality, narrative and the relation between political action, thought and disclosure, as well as her notions of political public space and its relation to past and future. I argue that in adapting Kant’s conception of judgment as presented in his Critique of Judgment, Arendt also inherits a problematic pair of ideas associated with it: ‘Taste’ and sensus communis. These concepts, I suggest, raise questions of authority, exclusion and participation that were already politically coded in Kant. Examining the part they came to play in Arendt’s thought helps us to see a significant problematic for a political thought that would aspire to be critical and radical. Specifically, it exposes two closely interlinked questions: that of the limits of the political (its character and distinctiveness) and that of the political subjects themselves (the notion of proper and improper political subjects). I conclude that an engagement with the role of reflective judgment in Arendt is an illuminating and important way to understand both the radical current in Arendt’s thought and the challenge faced by any radical political thought at the opening of the twenty-first century.

In this thesis it is argued that Kant's Copernican turn depends on his doctrine of the imagination, and that by understanding the role of imagination as symbolic rather than schematic, the resources are provided to show that his critical philosophy has more radical possibilities than those of his post-Kantian critics. To display this, it is first pointed out that the crucial role the imagination plays in Kant's Copernican turn is not fully developed in his first Critique. Next, it is argued that Kant's doctrine of the imagination is not fully realized until the third Critique in which Kant radicalizes his notion of constructivism by introducing a distinction between determinative and reflective judgments. Finally, it is suggested that while Hegel believes that Kant?s idealism is not dynamic enough to support a full-fledged constructivism, in fact, when Kant?s mature doctrine of the imagination is taken into account, this is no longer the case because Kant believes that our particular experiences of the world unfold artistically and creatively according to the work of the imagination. It is suggested, therefore, that in many ways Kant anticipates the developments of thinkers such as Hegel and other post- Kantians and may even continue to lie beyond them.