Evil threatens human reason, for it challenges our hope that the world makes sen
se. For eighteenth-century Europeans, the Lisbon earthquake was manifest evil. T
oday we view evil as a matter of human cruelty, and Auschwitz as its extreme inc
arnation.
Examining our understanding of evil from the Inquisition to contemp
orary 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 orig
inally animated it. Whether expressed in theological or secular terms, evil pose
s a problem about the world's intelligibility.
