Fall 2001 Advanced Special Topic:  “Modernity and the Problem of Evil.” Tuesday-Thursday 12:45-2:05. Distinguished Visiting Professor of the Humanities: Peter Dews

For many thinkers after Nietzsche, the concept of evil is simply a residue of an outdated theological perspective on the world.  For others it remains an indispensable part of our ethical vocabulary, especially when we confront the moral atrocities of the twentieth century, including the Holocaust.  In this seminar we will explore modern uses of the concept of ‘evil’, and some of the major problems they raise.  Right at the beginning of the continental philosophical tradition, Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone raises three crucial questions which have remained central to debates about evil:

1. Can the use of this concept be justified in purely philosophical terms, or does it require a rethinking of the relation between religious and philosophical discourse? 
2. Can human beings be motivated by the sheer perverse desire to do harm or wrong, or must there always be some underlying motive of self-interest, as Kant claims? 
3. Can evil be ‘explained’ or at least made intelligible (for example, psychoanalytically or sociologically)? 

Or is our notion of evil essentially intertwined with a sense of ultimate resistance to comprehension?  In this seminar, we will track philosophical debates around these issues through a range of nineteenth and twentieth-century thinkers, including Schelling, Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, Emil Fackenheim and Emmanuel Levinas.

Pre-requisites: English 390; Gender and Women’s Studies 249; History 238, 239, or 242; Humanities 246; Philosophy 234, 235, 242, 267, or 268; Political Science 255, 256, 263, or 264; Religious Studies 213, 216, 318.

Syllabus (pdf file)