The Concept of Anxiety
All of Kierkegaard's books have either a preface, dedication, or prayer at the beginning. This book includes a lengthy introduction. "The Concept of Anxiety" was published on exactly the same date as "Prefaces", June 17, 1844. Both books deal with Hegel’s idea of mediation. Mediation is a common thread throughout Kierkegaard’s works. His work up to this point was to show that faith was being mediated by knowledge. Here he takes up the questions of sin and guilt.
Hannah Arendt
Arendt's last major work, "The Life of the Mind" remained incomplete at the time of her death. During Arendt's tenure at the New School, in 1974, she presented a graduate level political philosophy class entitled, "Philosophy of the Mind". It was during these class lectures that Arendt crystallized her concepts. The class was based on her working draft of "Philosophy of the Mind", which was later edited to "Life of the Mind". Arendt's working draft of "Philosophy of the Mind" was distributed to graduate students at the New School during her visiting professorship in 1974. She conceived of a trilogy based on the mental activities of thinking, willing, and judging. Stemming from her Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland (1972–1974), her last writing focused on the first two. In a sense, "Life of the Mind" went beyond her previous work concerning the "". In her discussion of thinking, she focuses mainly on Socrates and his notion of thinking as a solitary dialogue between oneself. This appropriation of Socrates leads her to introduce novel concepts of conscience—an enterprise that gives no positive prescriptions, but instead, tells one what I cannot do if I would remain friends with myself when I re-enter the two-in-one of thought where I must render an account of my actions to myself—and morality—an entirely negative enterprise concerned with forbidding participation in certain actions for the sake of remaining friends with oneself. She died suddenly five days after completing the second part, with the first page of Judging, still in her typewriter. The task then fell to McCarthy to edit the first two parts and provide some indication of the direction of the third.