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Rethinking Evil: Contemporary Perspectives
This innovative volume will be welcomed by moral and political philosophers, social scientists, and anyone who reflects seriously on the twentieth century's heavy burden of war, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other evidence of people's desire to harm one another. María Pía Lara brings together a provocative set of essays that reexamine evil in the context of a "postmetaphysical" world, a world that no longer equates natural and human evil and no longer believes in an omnipotent God. The question of how and why God permits evil events to occur is replaced by the question of how and why humans perform radically evil acts.
- GenresPhilosophy
328 pages, Paperback
First published November 30, 2001
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October 17, 2020
Another title I've carried around for a couple decades and finally got around to read. It's an anthology from 2001.
The topic is like theodicy, though mostly secular. It asks: What is evil? (Some degree of intention when we take actions that we know will have some degree of negative effect on someone else?) Is it mostly due to ignorance or to an evil impulse? How does it spread? How can we overcome it? The language is academic, but it doesn't offer a schema where you can plug in the answers. It's also theoretical — there are rather few real-life examples — and I got the sense it is meant to be understood more like poetry. If you linger over it, it might provoke some insight from within yourself.
I liked Richard J. Bernstein's analysis of Kant: We have a predisposition [Anlage] which is basically good, and we're led astray by an evil propensity [Hang], and with our free will we choose our disposition [Gesinnung].
Also, Robert Fine, quoting Hannah Arendt in “The Eggs Speak Up” (1951), as she told us that liberalism has “demonstrated its inability to resist totalitarianism so often that its failure may already be counted among the historical facts of our century.” The "heyday of the liberal tradition" (as Fine puts it) is something we can remember fondly but, as Arendt said, it's not "in our power to return to it.”
Jeffrey C. Alexander: “The discourse of civil society can be seen, in a certain sense, as revolving around secular salvation. To know how to be part of civil society is to know how one can be ‘socially saved.’”
The topic is like theodicy, though mostly secular. It asks: What is evil? (Some degree of intention when we take actions that we know will have some degree of negative effect on someone else?) Is it mostly due to ignorance or to an evil impulse? How does it spread? How can we overcome it? The language is academic, but it doesn't offer a schema where you can plug in the answers. It's also theoretical — there are rather few real-life examples — and I got the sense it is meant to be understood more like poetry. If you linger over it, it might provoke some insight from within yourself.
I liked Richard J. Bernstein's analysis of Kant: We have a predisposition [Anlage] which is basically good, and we're led astray by an evil propensity [Hang], and with our free will we choose our disposition [Gesinnung].
Also, Robert Fine, quoting Hannah Arendt in “The Eggs Speak Up” (1951), as she told us that liberalism has “demonstrated its inability to resist totalitarianism so often that its failure may already be counted among the historical facts of our century.” The "heyday of the liberal tradition" (as Fine puts it) is something we can remember fondly but, as Arendt said, it's not "in our power to return to it.”
Jeffrey C. Alexander: “The discourse of civil society can be seen, in a certain sense, as revolving around secular salvation. To know how to be part of civil society is to know how one can be ‘socially saved.’”
Displaying 1 of 1 review