Dark Matters: Pessimism and the Problem of Suffering

An intellectual history of the philosophers who grappled with the problem of evil, and the case for why pessimism still holds moral value for us today

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, philosophers engaged in heated debates on the question of how God could have allowed evil and suffering in a creation that is supposedly good. Dark Matters traces how the competing philosophical traditions of optimism and pessimism arose from early modern debates about the problem of evil, and makes...