Abstract
Does philosophy have anything to say about the horrors of the world? Does philosophy matter? On a scale that compares the good and the bad, philosophy goes from one side to the other depending on which philosophers we choose to weigh. More broadly, an overall assessment of philosophy’s contribution to civilization eludes philosophers and historians. It proves difficult to demonstrate the effects that philosophy and philosophers have had on history. Did Aristotle, for example, change the course of history when he tutored Alexander the Great? Even in cases where philosophers have achieved considerable fame and notoriety, historians disagree about philosophy’s accomplishments overall.
We have been flooded with historical reports but philosophical reflection has been slow in coming …
Susan Neiman, “What’s the Problem of Evil?”1
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Notes
Maria Pia Lara, ed., Rethinking Evil (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), p. 41.
Maga Branka, The Destruction of Yugoslavia: Tracking the Break-up 1980–92 (London: Verso, 1993).
Samuel Totten and Steven Jacobs, eds, Pioneers of Genocide Studies (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002).
Alan S. Rosenbaum, ed., Is the Holocaust Unique?: Perspectives on Comparative Genocide, 2nd edn (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001).
Ronald D. Milo, Immorality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).
Paul Woodruff and Harry A. Wilmer, eds, Facing Evil: Light at the Core of Darkness (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1988).
Nel Noddings, Women and Evil (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989).
John Kekes, Facing Evil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).
Mary Midgley, Wickedness: A Philosophical Essay (London, New York: Routledge, 1992).
Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000).
Lara, ed., Rethinking Evil; Amelie Rorty, ed., The Many Faces of Evil: Historical Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2001).
Claudia Card, The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002).
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Viking Press, 1964).
Judith Shklar, The Faces of Injustice (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 51.
Raimond Gaita, A Common Humanity (New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 52.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1951), p. 459.
Paul Christopher, The Ethics of War and Peace: An Introduction to Legal and Moral Issues, 3rd edn (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2003), p. 38.
Frederick Russell, The Just War in the Middle Ages (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
See Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 7.
Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), p. 239.
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© 2005 Thomas W. Simon
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Simon, T.W. (2005). Genocide, Evil, and Injustice: Competing Hells. In: Roth, J.K. (eds) Genocide and Human Rights. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230554832_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230554832_6
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