Good & Evil Books - Page 12

Evil: Satan, Sin, and Psychology

Terry D. Cooper, Cindy K. Epperson

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Vessels Of Evil Pb

Laurence Mordekhai Thomas

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Two profound atrocities in the history of Western culture form the subject of this moving philosophical exploration: American Slavery and the Holocaust. An African American and a Jew, Laurence Mordekhai Thomas denounces efforts to place the suffering of one group above the other. Rather, he pronounces these two defining historical experiences as profoundly evil in radically different ways and points to their logically incompatible aims. The author begins with a discussion of the nature of evil, exploring the fragility of human beings and the phenomena of compartmentalizing, unquestioning obedience to authority, and moral drift. Citing compelling examples from history and contemporary life, he characterizes evil acts in terms of moral agency, magnitude, and intent. With moving testimony, Thomas depicts the moral pain of African Americans and Jews during their ordeals and describes how their past as victims has affected their future. Without invidious comparison, he distinguishes between extermination and domination, death and natal alienation, physical and mental cruelty, and between being viewed as irredeemable evil and as a moral simpleton. Thomas also considers the role of blacks and Jews in the Christian narrative. In "Vessels of Evil", Thomas also considers the ways Jews and blacks have gone on to survive. He analyzes the relative flourishing of Jews and the languishing of blacks in this country and examines the implications of their dissimilar tragedies on any future relationship between these two minorities. Laurence Mordekhai Thomas, Professor of Philosophy and Political Science Affiliate at Syracuse University, is also the author of "Living Morally" (Temple).

Eden's Garden: Rethinking Sin and Evil in an Era of Scientific Promise

Richard J. Coleman

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

EDEN'S GARDEN 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Rare it is that a commentator on religion and science is competent in both and so can walk into the topic rather than limp. Richard Coleman did not limp in his COMPETING TRUTHS: Theology and Science as Sibling Rivals (Trinity Press International, 2001). Masterfully, he exploited the family metaphor of siblings to exhibit the common "Western" (Christian and Enlightenment) roots of science and theology, the essential context for understanding their mutual tensions and prospects. Now, in EDEN'S GARDEN: Rethinking Sin and Evil in an Era of Scientific Promise (Roman and Littlefield, 2007), Coleman exhibits how the two siblings can cooperate in understanding and confronting "Sin" and "Evil," the two giants blocking humanity's way to a more humane (intelligent and compassionate) future.
"Adam and Eve neglected to ask the question" of "overreaching"--now, "the unbridled optimism of an over-promising science." "The book is a theological gloss on the posthuman debate about the nature of being human." "A rethinking of sin and evil is required" if we are to "be wary of what we might do to our planet and ourselves." (p.x) ""If the values we hold most dear are worthy to guide our future, they should be able to withstand the scrutiny of science while remaining true to our most deeply held beliefs. The wisdom we require to guide us through this twenty-first century is both theological and scientific." (p.121)
Science and theology have different domains of truth and ways of wisdom, and humanity needs each to "counterbalance" the other.
Our century may be humanity's most dangerous, but this highly competent book evidences that it can prove to be humanity's most hopeful century.

Editorial Review:

In Eden's Garden: Rethinking Sin and Evil in an Era of Scientific Promise, Richard Coleman examines the notion of sin in a contemporary world that values scientific and nonreligious modes of thought regarding human behavior. This work is not an anti-science polemic, but rather an argument to show how sin and evil can make sense to the nonreligious mind, and how it is valuable to make sense of such phenomena. Examining themes in religion, philosophy, and theology, it is ideal for use in the numerous courses which move across these disciplines.

Is Nature Ever Evil?: Religion, Science and Value

Willem Drees

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Editorial Review:

Can one call nature 'evil'? Or is life a matter of eating and being eaten, where value judgments should not be applied? Is nature beautiful? Or is beauty in the eye of the beholder? Scientists often pretend that their disciplines only describe and analyze natural processes in factual terms, without making evaluative statements regarding reality. However, scientists may also be driven by the beauty of that which they study. Or they may be appalled by suffering they encounter, and look for technical or medical means 'to improve nature'. Outside of the scientific community, value judgments are even more common. Humans evaluate nature and natural processes in moral, aesthetic and religious terms as cruel, beautiful, hopeful or meaningless. Is nature ultimately good, with all suffering and evil justified in the context of the larger evolutionary process? Or is nature to be improved, via culture or technology, as it is considered less adequate than it could be? In this book, some major scientists, theologians, and philosophers discuss these issues. As a study on the relations between religion and science, this is unique in emphasizing the evaluation of nature, rather than treating religion and science as competing or complementary casual explanations.

Tales of Good and Evil, Help and Harm

Philip P. Hallie

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Praise for Tales of Good and Evil, Help and Harm

"This [is a] beautiful book, written with what might be called disciplined moral passion...Crisp, plain-spoken, and forceful prose exemplifies this fine summary of one of those very rare lives spent immersed intellectually and personally, in issues of active moral engagement."
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"This is the work of a sensitive and imaginative philosopher who spent much of his life trying to understand how acts of moral heroism are possible. Hallie's account of such acts is both moving and illuminating."
--Richard Rorty, professor of philosophy, University of Virginia

"This is a grand, generous, big-hearted book...This book will restore your faith that goodness really exists, and sometimes even wins."
--Robert D. Richardson, Jr., author of Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind and Emerson: The Mind of Fire

"A Powerful, moving text, tough-minded, never sentimental, reminding us of the distinctive voice that was Philip Hallie's and why we return to his work again and again."
--Jean Bethke Elshtain, author of Democracy of Trail

The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche

Henry Louis Mencken, H. L. Mencken

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Editorial Review:

Nietzsche left no systematic exposition of his philosophy, and so it remains the subject of intense scholarly dispute and interpretation. Because of Nietzsche's evocative style and often outrageous claims, his philosophy generates strong reactions of passionate love and disgust. The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche by Henry Louis Mencken was the first, and many believe the best book on the subject. Mencken was known for his attention to detail. This book is a must read for anyone who wishes to understand Nietzche and his underlying philosophy.

The Idea of Evil

Peter Dews

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Editorial Review:

This timely book by philosopher Peter Dews explores the idea of evil, one of the most problematic terms in the contemporary moral vocabulary.

• Surveys the intellectual debate on the nature of evil over the past two hundred years
  
• Engages with a broad range of discourses and thinkers, from Kant and the German Idealists, via Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, to Levinas and Adorno
  
• Suggests that the concept of moral evil touches on a neuralgic point in western culture
  
• Argues that, despite the widespread abuse and political manipulation of the term ‘evil’, we cannot do without it
  
• Concludes that if we use the concept of evil, we must acknowledge its religious dimension

Wicked Pleasures: Meditations on the Seven Deadly Sins

Robert C. Solomon, Robert C. Solomon

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Well written. Well edited. A pleasure to read. 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 5 people found this review helpful.

Wicked Pleasures is a collection of well-informed, sometimes irreverant essays that reflect upon the so-called seven deadly sins-- lust, anger, envy, gluttony, greed, pride, sloth-- and in that process explain the hold they have on the moral imagination of Western Christendom for a millennium. Well written. Well edited. A pleasure to read.

Wicked Pleasures turned my notions of vice/versa. 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 5 people found this review helpful.

I am enjoying some of the seven deadly sins more but questioning what I once thought of as my virtues. Thanks, Robert Solomon, I needed that.

Makes You Think... 5 out of 5 stars.
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The authors of those passages made me think deeper into the so-called-sins and about the most-probable history that sins were not bad in God's eyes. But merely man-made ideas planted into history to make themselves feel more powerful. I highly recommend this book to anyone. Give it a try.

Editorial Review:

The seven deadly sins have provided gossip, amusement, and the plots of morality plays for nearly fifteen hundred years. In Wicked Pleasures, well-known philosopher, business ethicist, and admitted sinner Robert C. Solomon brings together a varied g

The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact (Talking Images)

Jean Baudrillard

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Standard fare 3 out of 5 stars.
10 of 21 people found this review helpful.

This review is admittedly brief and frankly only directed at those familiar with Baudrillard's work, since it's not really possible to buy the argument of The Intelligence of Evil without having bought the notion of the Impossible Exchange. That being said, the editor's word "summation" to describe this work in relation to Baudrillard's career is a little flattering--nothing significantly new appears here, and the kinds of things Baudrillard tends to say are fairly derivative of standard polemics a la Nietzsche, Bataille, Marcuse, and so on. Baudrillard once complained that no one describes his work as being 'serious', even when he thinks there are philosophically serious things in his works. One wonders why he feels entitled to that description when nothing in his writing invites the kind of attitude he thinks should be taken to his work. It is one thing to be philosophical and quite another to do philosophy. At best Baudrillard qualifies for the former since nothing about the way he writes could pass for 'philosophy', even if one is not particularly wedded to an Anglo-American idea of what 'philosophy' should be (as I am not myself). His paragraphs are at times provocative, but rambling and more often than not vague. The translator calls Baudrillard's work "philosophical analyses of current events in the best Deleuzian fashion", which again is a little flattering--Deleuze and Guattari's Capitalism and Schizophrenia 1 and 2 are incomparable with regard to the intellectual and philosophical challenge they present to the reader, regardless of whether or not one finds their arguments any more or less compelling than Baudrillard's. Baudrillard's jargon and terminology simply have nowhere near the rigor or historical depth of many of his compatriots.

The title 'The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact' relies on a Platonic reading of a line from Adorno (strange in itself!): "It is no longer a question of a thought critical of reality, but of a subversion of reality in its principle, in its very self-evidence. The greater the positivity, the more violent is the--possibly silent--denial. ... But this denial does not lead to hope, as Adorno would have it: 'Hope, as it emerges from reality by struggling against it to deny it, is the only manifestation of lucidity.' Whether for good or for ill, this is not true. Hope, if we were still to have it, would be hope for intelligence--for insight into--good. Now, what we have left is intelligence of evil, that is to say, not intelligence of a critical reality, but of a reality that has become unreal by dint of positivity, that has become speculative by dint of simulation." (I read Baudrillard's reading of negation and transcendence as Platonic in this context.) In other words, Baudrillard is rehashing comments about hyperreality in Simulacra and Simulation or the kinds of things said by any number of social critics since Simmel, Marx, and Nietzsche that talk about the outstripping of the subject by the objective world. (Incidentally, Baudrillard's conception of the dual illusion of subjectivity and objectivity is one that I find incoherent with other criticisms he gives about the failure of transcendence and the loss of reality.) As for the "pact" part of "the lucidity pact", this relies on a distinction between a "pact" and "contract" which is interesting, but undeveloped.

Regardless of Baudrillard's work as a whole, what I really wanted to say about this work in particular is simply that it's only really useful either for those who have already read others of Baudrillard's works or those who are tired of (in my opinion) better social critics saying much the same thing about the loss of reality (the other theorists with whom Baudrillard aligns himself, such as Zizek and Agamben, seem to have more understandable criteria for knowing when we are actually experiencing reality) and/or ungrounding the war on terror. The motive is admirable even if the execution is not.

Editorial Review:

There are few philosophers today cool enough to be referenced in the Matrix, interesting enough to be mentioned on Six Feet Under, and popular enough to get over 606,000 hits on Google. Jean Baudrillard has succeeded in all of this and more. Now, in his latest book, Baudrillard presents his most popular themes--symbolic exchange, hyper-reality, technology and war--and applies them to the current global conflict between "the West and the Rest", including Islam. Ultimately, it is not simply about the war against terror but about the bigger picture of capitalism versus everything else. This book serves as the summation of Baudrillard's work over the last twenty years and is the essential analysis of the fundamental conflict of our time.

A Species in Denial

Jeremy Griffith

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Editorial Review:

A Species In Denial is Jeremy Griffith's definitive work on the human condition after 30 years writing on the subject. Foreword by Templeton Prize winning biologist, Charles Birch. Addresses the crux issue of the human condition, our capacity for good and evil, describing how humans have coped with the dilemma by living in denial of it. The book then explains the biological reason for the human condition, ending the denial and maturing humanity to psychological freedom. Examines science, religion, politics, psychiatry, mythology, men and women.

There is an Introduction to the subject of the human condition and then four extraordinary essays: Deciphering Plato's Cave Allegory, Resignation, Bringing Peace to the War Between the Sexes and the Denial-Free History Of The Human Race, The Demystification of Religion. The book concludes with a brief profile of the Foundation for Humanity's Adulthood, a non-profit organisation committed to promoting this new frontier of thinking, written by world renowned mountaineer and twice honoured Order of Australia recipient, FHA Director Tim Macartney-Snape AM.

A Species In Denial has become a bestseller in Australia where it has generated extraordinarily positive responses from eminent people and the public.