Martha Nussbaum, in her book Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton, 2011), observes that “The humanities and the arts are being cut away, in both primary/secondary and college/university education, in virtually every nation of the world. Seen… Read more ›
The German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906-1975; see here for an overview of her work) offered two groundbreaking and closely connected theories of evil, the banality of evil and radical evil, that help us rethink many common conceptions of not only evil but… Read more ›
The German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906-1975; see here for an overview of her work) offered two groundbreaking and closely connected theories of evil, the banality of evil in her Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963)… Read more ›
I take the concept of evil very seriously and have written many posts on it over the years. But some think we should abandon the concept of evil altogether. In this post I want to briefly take a look at… Read more ›
Classic utilitarianism, whose classic proponents were Jeremy Bentham (1789), John Stuart Mill (1861), and Henry Sidgwick (1907), is a moral theory which doesn’t consider motives and acts as having any intrinsic moral value. Rather, motives and acts can only be… Read more ›
Evil, after many years of neglect in ethics, has returned as a topic of interest since at least 9/11. One of the things that characterizes this return is the use of science. Traditionally, evil has been understood as a phenomenon… Read more ›
In May 1963, the Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007) retrospectively described his films Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence as a trilogy with a theme: “The theme of these three films is a ‘reduction’ – in… Read more ›
Soren Kierkegaard Introduction It is popular these days to think about evil from a scientific perspective that sees evil as, for example, a function of an improperly working brain. Such approaches typically remove free will and the more traditional parameters… Read more ›
In the previous post we saw how aspects of Stoker’s Dracula can be interpreted through the psychoanalytic lens. This led us to consider symbols of unconscious drives, fears, wishes, and defense mechanisms. We also saw how sadism, masochism, and repression… Read more ›
In 1897 Bram Stoker wrote his novel Dracula and, in doing so, set the archetype for the modern vampire. Vampire legends had been around since at least the ancient world[1] and the term ‘vampire’ was in circulation since at least… Read more ›
Tristan Tzara, in his Dadaist Manifesto of 1918, argued that Dadaists were out to “assassinate beauty”. But why would anyone want to assassinate beauty? In the previous post in this series (go here) I discussed, with reference to Plato’s Symposium,… Read more ›
In a previous post (see here) I presented an essay exploring the relationship between freedom and critical thinking. Here I want to briefly suggest that human freedom, that most elusive yet visceral of phenomena, can be understood in a very… Read more ›
It is a great misfortune and embarrassment that the history of Western philosophy has little to say about why racism—the belief that different races have different qualities and abilities, and that some races are inherently superior or inferior—occurs. One of… Read more ›
Soren Kierkegaard The Danish existentialist philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), via his pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis (a Latin transcription for “the watchman of Copenhagen”), put forth a disturbing and ground-breaking account of demonic evil in chapter four of his 1844 work The Concept… Read more ›