Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy [Hardcover]

Evil has become the subject of one book after another, but [this] is one book unlike any other - by a philosopher unlike any other. -- Bill Moyers NOW Scintillating and self-disciplined - a very rare thing in a philosopher. -- Jonathan Ree Times Literary Supplement Provocative and profound. -- Damon Linker The Wall Street Journal The American philosopher Susan Neiman has written the book for this world-political hour. e Zuricher Zeitung A brilliant new book... No summary can convey the intellectual firepower of Neiman's book. Within her field of interest, she seems not only to have read everything but to have understood it at the deepest level. -- William C. Placher Christian Century Eloquent... [Neiman argues that] evil is not just an ethical violation, it disrupts and challenges our interpretation of the world. -- Edward Rothstein The New York Times Neiman follows the argument like a sleuth, and, indeed, her book is a kind of thriller: What is it that menaces us? Will we find what evil is? And how may we escape it? The path leads from a God found absent past a Nature that's indifferent till it fetches up at the house of a man himself... Neiman leads the reader through a careful analysis of the relation of intention, act, and consequence to kinds of useful knowledge and degrees of awareness. -- William H. Gass Harper's Magazine This great work...looks into these abysses with astonishing fearlessness. Die Zeit An erudite and compelling intellectual treatise that is profoundly interesting, often witty, and constructed without resorting to jargon or obfuscation... In reorienting the history of philosophy, she has made it come alive... This is a fine, even elegant book. Choice This is an accessible work of philosophy in the best sense, sharply focused on matters of vital human concern and free of the domain tics that mar even allegedly popular works by Anglo-American philosophers. -- Mark Lilla The New York Review of Books Clear, elegant and inviting...suddenly, (philosophy) is again a matter of life and death. Die Welt We badly need alternative histories of philosophy. The story told (by me, among others) cries out for supplementation... Neiman's snazzy prose makes this book a pleasure to read, as well as an immensely welcome change from the sort of history of philosophy to which we have become accustomed. -- Richard Rorty Common Knowledge A deeply moving and scholarly book that will interest many general readers. Library Journal Neiman's book is a welcome contribution to a philosophical conversation too long neglected. -- Barry Allen Toronto Globe and Mail Neiman argues that when we ask why the world is the way it is, rather than the way it ought to be, thatA's the same as thinking about evil... If there is only a single standard of good behavior, then no matter how honestly we believe in our causes--in democracy, for instance, as opposed to tyranny or religious totalitarianism--we are never allowed to stop worrying about our own morality when we march forth to defend them. -- Judith Shulevitz New York Times Book Review Neiman argues that, confronted with the enormity of the Holocaust, 20th-century thinkers found new grounds to conclude that what we call evil reflects nothing so much as the unintelligibility of the world... [Her] conclusion is that we should neither abandon reason nor demand the impossible from it but rather rely on it as much as we can to identify the forms of suffering and acts of cruelty that we have the power to prevent, remedy or diminish. -- Peter Berkowitz Washington Post Book World Superb... Neiman's claim to have written an alternative history is not an empty boast. First Things Neiman's audacity and occasionally morbid wit are a welcome addition to contemporary philosophy. If there is any hope after Auschwitz, we may find it in the fact that human minds will not stop trying to make some kind of meaning out of it. -- Alan Wolfe Books & Culture Neiman's narrative ... sheds light not just on the writings of particular thinkers, but also on their relation to one another. And it helps us begin to understand certain facts about the modern period that current philosophers find baffling. -- Thomas Hibbs The Weekly Standard Neiman's book is written with considerable flair, as many critics have already noted, but it possesses a far rarer and more valuable quality: moral seriousness. Her argument builds a powerful emotional force, a sense of deep inevitability... It is not often that a work of such dark conclusions has felt so hopeful and brave. -- Mark Kingwell Wilson Quarterly

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. In this book, Susan Neiman tells the history of modern philosophy as an attempt to come to terms with evil. She reintroduces philosophy to anyone interested in questions of life and death, good and evil, suffering and sense.

"This is a splendid book; it will be widely read and much discussed. Working from the assumption that philosophers ought to attend to 'the questions that brought us here,' Susan Neiman has given us a brilliant reading of those who have done just that. Her history of philosophy is also a philosophical argument: that evil is the central question driving the best modern philosophy, and that it is not only a moral question but a metaphysical one. The book is written with grace and wit; again and again, Neiman writes the kind of sentences we dream of uttering in the perfect conversation: where every mot is bon. This is exemplary philosophy."--Michael Walzer

"A brilliant study of changes in our understanding of evil from the book of Job through the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and on to the Holocaust and September 11. Neiman makes a powerful case for taking that problem as central to the history of modern philosophy, and her analysis of our present resources for coping with evil are provocative as well as profound. It's an immensely illuminating book."--J. B. Schneewind

"In tracing the responses to the problem of evil from the Enlightenment, when the question was why the Lisbon earthquake and the engagés were Voltaire, Leibniz, Pope, and Rousseau, to the present, when it is why Auschwitz and they are Améry, Arendt, Camus, and Adorno, Neiman has made an original and powerful contribution to the analysis of an intractable moral issue: how to live with the fact that neither God nor nature seems concerned with our fate. Succinctly, steadily, and relentlessly written, the history of philosophy as philosophy could hardly be better done."--Clifford Geertz

"Even--or especially--to a nonphilosopher like myself, Susan Neiman's Evil in Modern Thought offers intellectual adventure of a high order. The audacity of her recasting of Western philosophy is matched by its profundity--and frequent wit. Its challenges are as bracing as they are essential. Her intellectual fearlessness deserves the closest and widest attention."--Todd Gitlin

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Susan Neiman is Director of the Einstein Forum, Potsdam. Her previous works include "Slow Fire: Jewish Notes from Berlin" and "The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant". Neiman studied philosophy at Harvard University and the Freie Universitat-Berlin, and was Associate Professor of Philosophy at Yale University and Tel Aviv University. She is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences.