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.

We badly need alternative histories of philosophy. The story told (by me, among others) about philosophy from Descartes to Hegel being dominated by the problematic of epistemological skepticism cries out for supplementation, though not necessarily for replacement. Neiman sees the great figures of this period as worrying more about evil than about knowledge. Ever since Plato, she says, "the worry that fueled debates about the difference between appearance and reality was not the fear that the world might not turn out to be the way it seems to us—but rather the fear that it would."

That is a good example of Neiman's snazzy prose, which makes this book a pleasure to read, as well as an immensely welcome change from the sort of history of philosophy to which we Anglophones have grown accustomed. (The Germans, as she points out, are better at this sort of thing; compare Copleston to Blumenberg, for example.)

Neiman is very successful at reminding us that everybody down to Hegel took theodicy very seriously, but less so when she suggests that contemporary thinkers should still ponder the nature and cause of evil. Her claim that twentieth-century intellectuals were to Auschwitz as eighteenth-century intellectuals were to Lisbon works for some people, such as Adorno, but hardly for all. Lisbon impugned God, but Auschwitz only impugned Inevitable Progress, which not all that many people ever believed in anyway.

—Richard Rorty（理查·羅蒂）