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Evil in Modern Thought - An Alternative History of Philosophy (Paperback, Revised edition)
Loot Price: R549
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Evil in Modern Thought - An Alternative History of Philosophy (Paperback, Revised edition)
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List price R678
Loot Price R549
Discovery Miles 5 490
You Save R129 (19%)
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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Evil threatens human reason, for it challenges our hope that the
world makes sense. For eighteenth-century Europeans, the Lisbon
earthquake was manifest evil. Today we view evil as a matter of
human cruelty, and Auschwitz as its extreme incarnation. 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. In the
process, she rewrites the history of modern thought and points
philosophy back to the questions that originally animated it.
Whether expressed in theological or secular terms, evil poses a
problem about the world's intelligibility. 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. Traditional
philosophers from Leibniz to Hegel sought to defend the Creator of
a world containing evil. 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. They also yielded the
distinction between natural and moral evil that we now take for
granted. Neiman turns to consider philosophy's response to the
Holocaust as a final moral evil, concluding that two basic stances
run through modern thought. One, from Rousseau to Arendt, insists
that morality demands we make evil intelligible. The other, from
Voltaire to Adorno, insists that morality demands that we don't.
Beautifully written and thoroughly engaging, this book tells the
history of modern philosophy as an attempt to come to terms with
evil. It reintroduces philosophy to anyone interested in questions
of life and death, good and evil, suffering and sense. 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.
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