Academic literature on the topic 'Metaphysics of evil'

In his eleventh century dialogue De Casu Diaboli, Anselm seeks to avoid the problem of evil for theodicy and explain the fall of Satan as attributable to Satan’s own self-creating wrongful will. It is something, as such, for which God as Satan’s divine Creator cannot be held causally or morally responsible. The distinctions on which Anselm relies presuppose an interesting metaphysics of nonbeing, and of the nonbeing of evil in particular as a privation of good, worthy of critical philosophical investigation in its own right. Anselm’s concept of nonbeing does not resolve the philosophical problem of evil implied by Satan’s fall from grace, but is shown perhaps more unexpectedly to enable Anselm’s proof for the inconceivable nonexistence of God as the greatest conceivable intended object of thought to avoid Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason objection to the general category of ‘ontological’ arguments.

The article reviews different antitheodicies in response to Toby Betenson’s article “Anti-Theodicy”. Antitheodicies involve rejecting the position that God or meaning exist only, if evils have justifying morally sufficient reasons. The article builds on Betenson’s division into moral and conceptual antitheodicies and his characterization of antitheodicies as a metacritique of the problem of evil. Moral antitheodicies are problematic, as they do not address the key conceptual issues and might end up in question-begging or moralism. Dissolving the problem of evil requires a conceptual antitheodicy that exposes its presuppositions as speculative metaphysics. Religious conceptual antitheodicies help to focus on different ways of sense-making that do not fall into theodicism.

There is a close systematic relationship between panentheism, as a metaphysical theory about the relation between God and the world, and transhumanism, the ethical demand to use the means of the applied sciences to enhance both human nature and the environment. This relationship between panentheism and transhumanism provides a ‘cosmic’ solution to the problem of evil: on panentheistic premises, the history of the world is the one infinite life of God, and we are part of the one infinite divine being. We ourselves are therefore responsible for the future development of the life of the divine being. We should therefore use the means provided by the natural sciences to develop the history of the world in such a way that the existence of evil shall be overcome and shall no longer be part of the divine being in whom we move and live and have our being. The metaphysics of panentheism leads to the ethics of transhumanism.

James Sterba’s book, Is a Good God Logically Possible?, argues that given the amount of significant and horrendous evil in the world, it is not possible for a (morally) good God to exist. This article draws on the work of Brian Davies’ interpretation of Thomistic metaphysics and theology proper and argues that God is not a moral being, and thus has no obligations to prevent such evil. If such is the case, then the problem of evil as presented by Sterba is not a problem for God’s existence.

Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2006.
Title from title screen. Melissa Merritt, committee chair; Andrew Altman, Andrew J. Cohen, committee members. Electronic text (44 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Apr. 19, 2007. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2007.
Title from file title page. Timothy M. Renick, committee chair; Tim O'Keefe, Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr., committee members. Electronic text (110 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed Jan. 18, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. 103-110).

Soigner, est un mouvement vers celui qui nécessite des soins, essentiellement habité par la bonté. Ainsi dit et pense l’ange dans sa magnificence. Las ! La personne soignée, par son regard, de confiance et souffrance mêlées, souligne sa fréquente faillite. Ainsi l’ange déçoit et de ce fait, déchoit. Si le bien est inhérent au soin quelle peut-être la réalité de ce mal dénoncé ? Existe-t-il, « en-soi », telle la face cachée du bien, et que l’on nommerait de ce fait, le « moindre mal » dont les patients seraient bien avisés de se contenter ? Ou bien est-il totalement dépendant de l’action soignante et de son contexte ? Aristote évoquait un monde sublunaire, où règne le contingent – ce qui pourrait ne pas être, et un monde supra-lunaire, lieu du nécessaire – ce qui ne peut pas ne pas être. À quel monde appartient le soin, et si le mal existe réellement quelles en sont les formes ? La morale, dont tout le monde suppose qu’elle sous-tend la situation de soin, se décline effectivement différemment selon les époques et les lieux, l’Histoire nous l’a bien montré. Nous posons l’hypothèse d’une dimension métaphysique du soin au-delà de l’éthique de l’acteur de soin. Cette ontologie, rendrait universelle une nécessaire vigilance à l’égard de ce que tous les acteurs du soin, y compris les structures tutélaires et la puissance publique sont conjointement déterminés à en faire, dans une ambiance de transformation radicale des savoirs prédictifs et de la dématérialisation des rencontres
Caring is a movement towards the ones who need care, essentially inhabited by kindness. This is the way the angel thinks and expresses himself, in his own magnificence. Las! The cared person, feeling as much trust as suffering, points out his frequent failure. This is also the way the angel disappoints and thereby falls. If goodness is inherent to care, is this reported evil real ? Does it exist, "in-itself », such as the dark side of good ? We could thus call it "the least evil", whose patients would be well advised to be satisfied of. Or is it directly derived from the caring action and its context ? Aristotle talks about a sub-lunar contingent world, which can not be, and a supra-lunar world, a necessary and inevitable world, which cannot not be. To which world does care belong, and if evil really exists, what are its forms ? Morality, which everyone supposes to underlie the situation of care, declines and indeed varies according to the times and places, as History has shown us well. We suppose that the metaphysical dimension of care is beyond the givercare’s ethic. This ontology would make universal a necessary vigilance regarding to what all the actors of care are jointly determined to do. Among these, we unclude guardianship structures and public authorities. We will thus also approach both the atmosphere of radical and predictive knowledge and the dematerialization of meetings

Horrendous evils pose distinctive challenges for belief in an ethically perfect God. To home in on these challenges, I construct an ethical framework for theodicy by sketching four cases of human action where horrors are either caused, permitted, or risked, either for pure benefit (i.e., a benefit that does not avert a still greater harm) or for harm avoidance. I then bring the framework and the moral valuations confirmed by this casuistry to bear on the project of theodicy. I construct four analogous structures – one for each case – and identify examples of each structure in theodicies in contemporary philosophy of religion. I summarize each theodicy and evaluate whether it is structurally promising with respect to horrendous evils. That is, if the proposed interconnected set of facts and reasons were true, would God be ethically in the clear? My initial conclusions impugn the dominant structural approach of depicting God as causing or permitting horrors in individual lives for the sake of some merely pure benefit. This approach is insensitive to relevant asymmetries in the justificatory demands made by horrendous and non-horrendous evil and in the justificatory work done by averting harm and bestowing pure benefit. I next argue that the structurally promising theodicies I have identified are implausible due to their overestimation of the extent to which finite human agents can bear primary responsibility for horrendous evils and their underestimation of the importance for theodicy of being consonant with a broadly Darwinian approach to evolutionary theory. The project of theodicy is in trouble. The second half of my thesis develops an approach to theodicy that falls outside my proffered taxonomy. Following a suggestion of Leibniz, Robert Adams has argued that theodicy can be aided by the insight that almost all of the evil of the actual world is metaphysically necessary for the community of actual world inhabitants to be comprised of the specific individuals who comprise it. Beginning with this insight, I develop (what I term) Non-Identity Theodicy. It suggests that God allows the evil he does in order to create and love the specific individuals comprising the community of inhabitants of the actual world. This approach to theodicy is unique because the justifying good recommended is neither harm-aversion nor pure benefit. It is not a good that betters the lives of individual human persons (for they wouldn’t exist otherwise), but it is the individual human persons themselves. In order to aim successfully at the creation of particular individuals, however, God would need a control of history so complete that it might be argued to be inconsistent with beliefs about human free will that are important to some theologies. I construct a second version of Non-Identity Theodicy designed to avoid this problem by considering whether God’s justifying motivation for allowing the evil of this world could be his aiming for beings of our type, even if it could not be his aiming for particular individuals. I suggest that God would be interested in loving those he creates under various descriptions (e.g., biological, psychological, and narrative descriptions), and argue that a horror-prone environment is necessary for us to be the type of being we are under each of the descriptions. I assess the structural promise and plausibility of Non-Identity Theodicy. In order to do so, I engage with Derek Parfit’s non-identity problem and with some influential assumptions in the ethics of procreation literature. I end by recapping what I take to be the key areas of overemphasis and under-emphasis in contemporary theodicy.

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Cioran (1911-1995) is a Romanian-French thinker who would not have the right to complain about being misunderstood or even ignored, inasmuch as he begged to turn marginality into a philosophical imperative and a lifestyle. Eleven years since his death, in Paris, and one hundred since his birth, in Transylvania, this one author, the perfect stranger in more than one sense, remains largely unknown by the Brazilian audience, scholarly or not, in such a way that his shady aura, so to speak, as well as countless legends and rumors prevail about his life, personality and thought. Having said that, and apart from his own will to marginality, Cioran is a thinker who just can t and will not remain as such for much longer ignored or spurned, be it by Academia as such or by particular intellectual milieus with varied ideological outlooks. All the more when it comes to reflect upon problems which happen to be just as prevailing as worrying, such as the rise of integralism and of fanaticism, be it religious or of any other kind, atheism, skepticism and nihilism in the XXth century, anguish, despair, the metaphysical need of mankind and the sense of ultimate transcendence, suffering, death, suicide, evil, finally, a wide range of questions which are all highly relevant from a philosophical standpoint and also that of human sciences. In the first part of this inquiry, we aim at showing that philosophical pessimism and apophatic dwell mix up in the existential metaphysics of Cioran, a religious philosophy of existence which, not being guided up by the faith in revealed truths and by the adhesion to external authorities, aims to think human existence and condition according to that which is most imperious and essential, in Cioran s view, when it comes to the metaphysical animal: wisdom rather than science, deliverance by disillusion rather than salvation by faith and knowledge, the need for the absolute to the detriment of the delusions of becoming, coping with the contingency inherent to existence, namely human existence, tragically gifted with reflexive consciousness, freedom, a destiny. Cioran s organically existential thought is inseparable from, as he puts it, from his own life experience, namely the insomnia to which he accredits the merit or the fault for his blessed, for his cursed lucidity: a state of mind incompatible with life, turning life into a state of non-suicide . If there is pessimism, skepticism, nihilism, mysticism within the sum of attitudes that composes the works of Cioran, such attitudes which might as well be modalized as reactions to the problem of evil, all these tendencies emanate from insomnia-bred lucidity. Secondly, we shall turn our attention to the topic of Cioran s écriture, with everything it implies, differently than his Romanian writing, as far as style, concern for expression and the aestheticizing of discourse are concerned. We aim at showing that the Farewell to philosophy enounced by the author in A short history of decay (Précis de decomposition), parallel to his literary turn and the radicalization of the fragmentary principle that precedes his French writing, is the paradoxical expression of a negation-driven thought which, by betraying Philosophy with Poetry, Music and Mysticism, cannot help but pay an unheard-of tribute to Human thought and to Philosophy itself. Finally, we argue that Cioran s French works represent, by its form and content, the necessary consequence and exact expression of a lucid, organic thought, which discovers in the écriture de soi the very destiny of Western Philosophy, and in Style as adventure the highest form of modern-thought heroism
Cioran (1911-1995) é um pensador romeno-francês que não teria o direito de reclamar por ser incompreendido e ignorado, pois ele mesmo fez da marginalidade um imperativo filosófico e um estilo de vida. Onze anos após o seu falecimento, em Paris, e cem anos após o seu nascimento, na Transilvânia, este autor, estrangeiro em mais de um sentido, permanece em grande medida desconhecido pelo público brasileiro, acadêmico ou não, fazendo prevalecer sua aura de obscuro e um sem-número de lendas e rumores sobre a sua vida, a sua personalidade, o seu pensamento. Dito isso, e vontade de marginalidade à parte, Cioran é um pensador que não pode ser e não permanecerá sendo por muito tempo ignorado ou desprezado, seja pela Academia como pelos círculos intelectuais com as mais diversas orientações ideológicas. Ainda mais quando se trata de pensar problemáticas, tão atuais quanto preocupantes, como a ascensão do fundamentalismo e do fanatismo, religioso ou de outra natureza, o ateísmo, o ceticismo e o niilismo no século XX, a angústia, o desespero, a necessidade metafísica do homem e o sentido da transcendência, o sofrimento, a morte, o suicídio, o mal, enfim, uma gama de questões altamente relevantes do ponto de vista da filosofia e também de outras disciplinas, como a psicologia e a história. Na primeira parte desta investigação, pessimismo filosófico e misticismo apofático convivem na metafísica existencial de Cioran, uma filosofia religiosa da existência que, sem se pautar pela fé em verdades relevadas e pela adesão a autoridades externas, busca pensar a condição e a existência humanas de acordo com aquilo que é mais urgente e essencial no animal metafísico, segundo o autor: a sabedoria antes que a ciência, a libertação pela desilusão e pelo não-saber antes que a salvação pela crença e pelo conhecimento, a necessidade de absoluto em detrimento da ilusão do devir, o enfrentamento da contingência inerente à existência, e particularmente à existência humana, tragicamente dotada de uma consciência, de uma liberdade, de um destino. O pensamento orgânico de Cioran é inseparável, como ele o reitera, de sua experiência de vida, notadamente a insônia à qual ele atribuiria, posteriormente, o mérito ou a culpa da sua bendita, maldita lucidez: um estado de espírito incompatível com a vida, tornando-a um estado de não-suicídio . Se há pessimismo, ceticismo, niilismo e misticismo na soma de atitudes que é a obra de Cioran, atitudes que podem ser justamente modalizadas como atitudes frente ao problema do mal, todas essas tendências emanam da lucidez gestada a partir de suas noites em branco. Em um segundo momento, nos voltaremos à questão da écriture cioraniana, com tudo o que ela implica, diferentemente da escrita romena, em termos de estilo, preocupação com a forma e estetização do discurso. Pretendemos mostrar como o Adeus à filosofia declarado por Cioran no Breviário de decomposição, concomitantemente à guinada literária e à acentuação do princípio fragmentário que precede sua obra francesa, é a expressão paradoxal de um pensamento da negação que, traindo a filosofia com a poesia, a música e a mística, não deixa de prestar uma homenagem inaudita ao pensamento e à própria Filosofia, doravante irreconhecível. Por fim, argumentamos que a obra francesa de Cioran representa, em forma e conteúdo, a consequência necessária e a expressão exata de um pensamento lúcido e orgânico que descobre na escritura de si o destino da filosofia e no estilo como aventura o grande heroísmo do escritor moderno. Em Cioran, Filosofia e Literatura se juntam numa fuga para dentro do niilismo, como forma de resistir às tentações do nada

Augustine, the fourth-century Christian philosopher, is perhaps best-known for his spiritual autobiography Confessions. Two aspects of the problem of evil are arguably critical for comprehending his life in Books 1 through 9 of the work. His search for the nature and origin of evil in the various philosophies that he encounters (the intellectual aspect) and his struggles with his own weaknesses (the experiential aspect) are windows for understanding the actual dynamics of his sojourn. I defend the idea above by providing a fuller examination of the key role that both aspects play in his spiritual journey. Examining relevant events from Augustine's life chronologically, I analyze his philosophical wanderings from his encounter with Cicero's work Hortensius through his eventual disillusionment with the Manichaean religion, and finally, his move in the direction of Christian teachings with the help of Neo-Platonism. Along the way his philosophical questions (the intellectual aspect) and his struggles with his own depravity (the experiential aspect) have an effect on each other until his ultimate move toward Christianity resolves both problems of evil.

Progression d'un concept, le mal radical, dans trois textes :La Religion dans les limites de la simple raison (Kant), Le système de l'Ethique (Fichte), et Le Traité de 1809 (Schelling). Origine ultime du mal :libre arbitre ou détermination ?Responsabilité et liberté du mal. Mal moral et métaphysique du mal/ Advance of a concept: radical evil, in three readings: Religion within the Limits of Mere Reason (Kant), System of Ethics (Fichte), and Treatise of 1809 (Schelling).Ultimate origin of evil: free will or determination? Responsibility and freedom to evil. Moral evil and metaphysics of evil.
Doctorat en Philosophie
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

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Focusing on the works of the Rumanian philosopher Emil Cioran (1911-1995), this study proposes an anthropological approach in order to elucidate the author s conception regarding human being. Cioran s writings portrait man as an essentially infirm being, idea from which this study takes off so as to explain what lies behind his anthropological pessimism. For such, it takes gathering, analyzing and interpreting the reflections offered by him on human being his origins, condition, history and destiny and that are spread out throughout his books. Besides, some of his critics will contribute to sustain the hypothesis: more than just a philosopher, Cioran is a religious thinker, whose pessimistic conception regarding human condition is rooted in gnostic soil. As it is intended to be demonstrated, his connections with gnosticism go way beyond a mere intellectual affinity, involving as well a kinship with the bogomils, a gnostic sect which settled in the Balkans during the Middle Ages and which is supposed to have had a significant role in shaping Rumania s cultural identity. Furthermore, it intends to argue that the crisis of insomnia endured by Cioran in his youth period has a cognitive and spiritual character allowing her to be interpreted as a gnosis. At last, this study commits itself with sustaining the following thesis: much more than his readings, it is rather his insomniac experience that turns out to be the decisive event responsible to shape his thought from then on, including his world and man view
Tendo a obra do filósofo romeno Emil Cioran (1911-1995) como objeto, este estudo parte de um recorte antropológico cuja intenção é lançar luzes sobre sua concepção de ser humano. Está presente em sua obra a idéia do homem como um animal enfermo por natureza, sendo este o ponto de partida que nos levará à compreensão do que está por trás do seu pessimismo antropológico. Para tanto, busca reunir, analisar e interpretar as diversas reflexões que o autor desenvolve sobre o ser humano sua origem, condição, história e destino e que se encontram espalhadas através de seus livros. Além de contar com alguns comentadores que contribuem para sustentar a hipótese: mais do que um filósofo, Cioran é um pensador de cunho religioso, cuja concepção pessimista acerca da condição humana encontra raízes no pensamento gnóstico. Conforme pretende demonstrar, sua relação com o gnosticismo vai muito além de uma mera afinidade intelectual, envolvendo também um parentesco com os bogomilos, seita gnóstica que habitou os Bálcãs durante a Idade Média e que teria influenciado profundamente a alma romena. Além disso, tentará mostrar que a crise de insônia sofrida por Cioran na juventude possui um sentido cognitivo e espiritual profundo que permite interpretá-la como uma gnose. Por fim, este estudo se compromete a sustentar a seguinte tese central: mais do que suas leituras, é a experiência de insônia o acontecimento decisivo que determinará todo seu pensamento posterior, sua visão de mundo assim como de ser humano

This chapter examines Schelling’s 1809 essay Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom to argue that it contains one of the most sophisticated challenges to Kant’s theory. Schelling criticises Augustine’s insistence that evil entails a privation of being by developing an original account of metaphysics and, by extension, evil that maintains that being entails an autopoietic process whereby a dark, chaotic, differentiating abyss expresses itself in actual, empirical being. By associating evil with this dark abyss, Schelling holds that ‘evil’ not only has actual being, but forms the differentiating foundation of actual existence. This brings Schelling to engage with the question of why some individuals choose to actualise this dark abyss while others do not. In contrast to Kant’s appeal to an unknowable noumenal decision orientated to the good that can be subsequently overcome, Schelling suggests that the choice of evil is an unconscious one that cannot subsequently be altered. The chapter concludes by raising two critical questions regarding Schelling’s analysis.