From Publishers Weekly
The word "evil" gets thrown around pretty frequently, especially in connection with certain Axes, but Einstein Forum director and former philosophy professor Susan Neiman reminds us that the existence of evil is a theological and intellectual dilemma through modern Western intellectual history in fact, she argues in her erudite and accessible Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy, the question of evil is at the heart of modern philosophy. Neiman looks at how philosophers and writers Leibniz and Arendt, Pope and Sade have sought to explain evil, and traces two divergent strains of thought: one that insists we must try to understand moral evil, and another that maintains we must not.Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
The current director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Neiman (The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant) examines the problem of evil, which she posits as central to philosophy since the 17th century. Philosophy is driven by the need to make sense of a world riddled with natural and moral evil and by our failures to do so. Leibniz (who thought this must be the best of all possible worlds) and Hegel (who thought reality must ultimately prove to be rational) are keys to her story, but Kant's effort to show that our best insights into reality stem from moral sensibilities, and Nietzsche, on the other side, who regarded most attempts to find a meaningful transcendent as moral cowardice, play large roles. Neiman begins with the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, perceived at the time as a manifestation of evil, but science and technology are (slowly) teaching us how to deal with such natural calamities. Moral evil, on the other hand, has not elicited as effective a response. Neiman is sympathetic to Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer and attentive to Emmanuel L‚vinas, who insisted that we must recover the transcendent or lose our rationality. Oddly, she ignores 20th-century attempts (by Samuel Alexander, Alfred North Whitehead, Teilhard de Chardin, etc.) to bring logic to bear on the subject. Still, this is a deeply moving and scholarly book that will interest many general readers. Leslie Armour, Univ. of Ottawa Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


Review
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.


Book Description
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.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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.

FROM THE CRITICS

Damon Linker - Wall Street Journal

Life is lived -- and tentative meaning is forged -- in the border zone between sense and senselessness: That is the lesson of this profound and provocative book. It is a lesson worth pondering as we prepare to commemorate Sept. 11 and to revisit the question of why such horrors happen in the first place.

Judith Shulevitz - New York Times

Philosophers have spent the past 300 years trying to come up with a better definition of evil than the one religion seems to offer, or so one philosopher, Susan Neiman, says in a new book, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy. This may seem perfectly obvious, but as a philosophical claim it is fairly controversial, because most historians of the subject would say that modern philosophy has been so anxious to differentiate itself from theology that it refused to talk about evil at all.

Publishers Weekly

The word "evil" gets thrown around pretty frequently, especially in connection with certain Axes, but Einstein Forum director and former philosophy professor Susan Neiman reminds us that the existence of evil is a theological and intellectual dilemma through modern Western intellectual history in fact, she argues in her erudite and accessible Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy, the question of evil is at the heart of modern philosophy. Neiman looks at how philosophers and writers Leibniz and Arendt, Pope and Sade have sought to explain evil, and traces two divergent strains of thought: one that insists we must try to understand moral evil, and another that maintains we must not. (Sept.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal