The Thinkers Guide To Evil

Download or read book The Thinker's Guide to Evil written by Peter Vardy and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2003 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book answers some of the questions like, How do we recognize evil today?

Download or read book Evil in Modern Thought written by Susan Neiman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-25 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Puzzle of Ethics written by Peter Vardy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-01 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 1994. Is there such a thing as right and wrong? Are some codes of behaviour more justified than others? Is it foolish to believe in moral principles? Is 'virtue' just a quaint Victorian term and does anyone care in any case? The Puzzle of Ethics tackles these formidable questions and many more in a clear and easy to understand manner without every becoming superficial. Throughout the approaches of major philosophers are explained and specific issues are addressed, including: Just War theory, situation ethics, abortion, euthanasia, as well as Buddhist, Hindu and Islamic ethics. This challenging book is of considerable relevance, dealing as it does with the central areas of ethical concern in today's world. It is the ideal introduction to the field for students.

Download or read book The Evil of Banality written by Elizabeth K. Minnich and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2024-11-05 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this expanded edition of The Evil of Banality, Elizabeth Minnich argues for a tragic yet hopeful explanation of “extensive evil,” her term for systematic, normalized harm-doing on the scale of genocide, slavery, sexualized dominance. The book now includes a new preface, new chapter, and expanded afterword addressing ongoing extensive evils, the paradox of lying, and the importance of developing the thinking without which conscience remains mute. Extensive evils are actually carried out not by psychopaths, but by people like your quiet next-door neighbor, your ambitious colleagues. There simply are not enough moral monsters to do the long hard work of extensive evils, nor enough saints for extensive good. In periods of extensive evil, people little different from you and me do its work for no more than a better job, a raise, the house of the family “disappeared” last week. So how can there be hope? Such evils are neither mysterious nor demonic. If we avoid romanticizing both the worst and best of which humans are capable, we can recognize and say no to extensive evil, practice and sustain extensive good, where they must take root – in ordinary lives.

Download or read book The Thinker's Guide to Fallacies written by Linda Elder and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-06-01 with total page 59 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Thinker’s Guide to Fallacies introduces the concept of mental trickery and shows readers how to discern and see through forty-four different types of fallacies. Focusing on how human self-deception and manipulation lie behind fallacies, this guide builds reasoning skills and promotes fairminded, logical thought, discussions, and debate. As part of the Thinker’s Guide Library, this book advances the mission of the Foundation for Critical Thinking to promote fair-minded critical societies through cultivating essential intellectual abilities and virtues across every field of study across world.

Download or read book Thinking about Good and Evil written by Wayne R. Allen and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2021-05 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2022 Top Five Reference Book from Academy of Parish Clergy The most comprehensive book on the topic, Thinking about Good and Evil traces the most salient Jewish ideas about why innocent people seem to suffer, why evil individuals seem to prosper, and God's role in such matters of (in)justice, from antiquity to the present. Starting with the Bible and Apocrypha, Rabbi Wayne Allen takes us through the Talmud; medieval Jewish philosophers and Jewish mystical sources; the Ba'al Shem Tov and his disciples; early modern thinkers such as Spinoza, Mendelssohn, and Luzzatto; and, finally, modern thinkers such as Cohen, Buber, Kaplan, and Plaskow. Each chapter analyzes individual thinkers' arguments and synthesizes their collective ideas on the nature of good and evil and questions of justice. Allen also exposes vastly divergent Jewish thinking about the Holocaust: traditionalist (e.g., Ehrenreich), revisionist (e.g., Rubenstein, Jonas), and deflective (e.g., Soloveitchik, Wiesel). Rabbi Allen's engaging, accessible volume illuminates well-known, obscure, and novel Jewish solutions to the problem of good and evil.

Download or read book How to Think written by Alan Jacobs and published by Currency. This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Absolutely splendid . . . essential for understanding why there is so much bad thinking in political life right now." —David Brooks, New York Times How to Think is a contrarian treatise on why we’re not as good at thinking as we assume—but how recovering this lost art can rescue our inner lives from the chaos of modern life. As a celebrated cultural critic and a writer for national publications like The Atlantic and Harper’s, Alan Jacobs has spent his adult life belonging to communities that often clash in America’s culture wars. And in his years of confronting the big issues that divide us—political, social, religious—Jacobs has learned that many of our fiercest disputes occur not because we’re doomed to be divided, but because the people involved simply aren’t thinking. Most of us don’t want to think. Thinking is trouble. Thinking can force us out of familiar, comforting habits, and it can complicate our relationships with like-minded friends. Finally, thinking is slow, and that’s a problem when our habits of consuming information (mostly online) leave us lost in the spin cycle of social media, partisan bickering, and confirmation bias. In this smart, endlessly entertaining book, Jacobs diagnoses the many forces that act on us to prevent thinking—forces that have only worsened in the age of Twitter, “alternative facts,” and information overload—and he also dispels the many myths we hold about what it means to think well. (For example: It’s impossible to “think for yourself.”) Drawing on sources as far-flung as novelist Marilynne Robinson, basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain, British philosopher John Stuart Mill, and Christian theologian C.S. Lewis, Jacobs digs into the nuts and bolts of the cognitive process, offering hope that each of us can reclaim our mental lives from the impediments that plague us all. Because if we can learn to think together, maybe we can learn to live together, too.