Perspectives on Evil

From Banality to Genocide

Buch | Softcover

300 Seiten

2019 | viii, 290 pp.
Brill (Verlag)
978-90-04-36582-7 (ISBN)

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This interdisciplinary study takes a real-life look at evil deeds and evil nature, from the Global Financial Crisis to the Rwanda Genocide and beyond. The authors share their personal and poignant views on evil.

The question of evil is one of the oldest and most intensely studied topics in intellectual history. In fiction, legend and mythology the boundary between good and evil is often depicted as clear-cut, at least to the reader or listener, who is supposed to understand such tales as lessons and warnings. Evil is something that must be avoided by the hero in some cases and vanquished in others; it is either the exact opposite of the expected good behaviour, or its complete absence. Even so, for the characters in these didactic fictions, it turns out to be deceptively easy to fall to the infernal, ‘dark’ side. This volume draws on the expertise of an interdisciplinary group of contributors to chart events and deeds of an ‘evil’ nature that have been lived in the (recent) past and have become part of history, from individual to institutionalised evil.

Kanta Dihal, D.Phil. (2018), Oxon., is Principal Investigator on the Global AI Narratives project at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge. She is co-editor of AI Narratives (Oxford University Press, 2020).

Notes on Contributors

Introduction

Kanta Dihal

Part 1

The Banality and the Familiarity of Evil

1 From Victims to Perpetrators: the Banality of Evil in Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones

Damian Catani

2 Unspeakable Banality: Discourse in Dispute

Cassie Pedersen

Part 2

Genocide in Rwanda

3 In Plain Sight: the Ethics of Proximity in the Holocaust and the Rwandan Genocide

Sarah Gendron

4 On the Role of Nation-States in Regulating Evil: a Case Study on Rwanda

Sally Nadeau

5 Extraordinary Forgiveness

Jennifer Vanderheyden

Part 3

Capitalism and the Socio-Psychology of Evil

6 Late Capitalism, Psychopathy and the Ontology of Evil

Helen Patey

7 Psychologising Evil in the Media: a Market-Like Exchange of Political Responsibility for Isolation in the Greek Crisis Environment

Sophia Kanaouti

8 The Fury of ‘Ressentiment’: Binary Codes, Evil and Society

Spiros Gangas

9 On the Usefulness of Being Unrealistic: a Critique of Freud’s Arguments against Neighbour Love

Regan Lance Reitsma

Part 4

Dehumanization, the Law and the Prison

10 Socio-Spatial Scripts: Evil and the Contestation of Space and Being

Rallie Murray

11 The Intersection between Evil and Architecture: Environment and Agency

Robert W. Butler

12 Choosing between Two Evils: a Philosophical Consideration of the Defences of Necessity and Duress in English Law

Stephen Banks

Index

Erscheinungsdatum	18.10.2019
Reihe/Serie	At the Interface / Probing the Boundaries ; 103
Verlagsort	Leiden
Sprache	englisch
Maße	155 x 235 mm
Gewicht	471 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Ethik
ISBN-10	90-04-36582-6 / 9004365826
ISBN-13	978-90-04-36582-7 / 9789004365827
Zustand	Neuware