Evil threatens human reason, for it challenges our hope that the world makes sense. -- First Things.
Featuring a substantial new afterword by Neiman that raises provocative questions about Hannah Arendt\'s take on Adolf Eichmann and the rationale behind the Hiroshima bombing, this Princeton Classics edition introduces a new generation of readers to this eloquent and thought-provoking meditation on good and evil, life and death, and suffering and sense.
It reintroduces Philosophy to anyone interested in questions of life and death, good and evil, suffering and sense.
Beautifully written and thoroughly engaging, this book tells the History of Modern Philosophy as an attempt to come to terms with evil.
The other, from Voltaire to Adorno, insists that morality demands that we don\'t.
One, from Rousseau to Arendt, insists that morality demands we make Evil intelligible.
Neiman turns to consider philosophy\'s response to the Holocaust as a final moral evil, concluding that two basic stances run through Modern thought.
They also yielded the distinction between natural and moral Evil that we now take for granted.
Inevitably, their efforts--combined with those of more literary figures like Pope, Voltaire, and the Marquis de Sade--eroded belief in God\'s benevolence, power, and relevance, until Nietzsche claimed He had been murdered.
Traditional philosophers from Leibniz to Hegel sought to defend the Creator of a world containing evil.
It confronts Philosophy with fundamental questions: Can there be meaning in a world where innocents suffer? Can belief in divine power or human progress survive a cataloging of evil? Is Evil profound or banal? Neiman argues that these questions impelled Modern philosophy.
Whether expressed in theological or secular terms, Evil poses a problem about the world\'s intelligibility.
In the process, she rewrites the History of Modern thought and points Philosophy back to the questions that originally animated it.
Examining our understanding of Evil from the Inquisition to contemporary terrorism, Susan Neiman explores who we have become in the three centuries that separate us from the early Enlightenment.
Today we view Evil as a matter of human cruelty, and Auschwitz as its extreme incarnation.
For eighteenth-century Europeans, the Lisbon earthquake was manifest evil.
Evil threatens human reason, for it challenges our hope that the world makes sense
