Evil in the Western Philosophical Tradition

Gavin Rae is Associate Professor (Accredited to Professor) in the Department of Logic and Theoretical Philosophy at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. His research interests lie in nineteenth and twentieth century European philosophy, where he works at the intersection of socio-political philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, ontology, and ethics. Besides over sixty published articles and book chapters, he has published seven monographs, most recently Questioning Sexuality: From Psychoanalysis to Gender Theory and Beyond (Edinburgh University Press, 2024) and Poststructuralist Agency: The Subject in Twentieth-Century Theory (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), and co-edited seven volumes, the most recent of which are Transformation in Contemporary French Theory (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming—with Emma Ingala and Cillian Ó Fathaigh), Critique and Political Reason: Exploring Critical Theory (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming—with Emma Ingala and Cillian Ó Fathaigh), Philosophy across Borders (Routledge, 2025—with Emma Ingala), and Subjective Agency and Poststructuralism (Routledge, 2025—with Cillian Ó Fathaigh).

• PrefaceIntroductionPart I: Theological Foundations1. The Rise of the Problem of Evil2. Augustine, Free Will, and Evil3. Aquinas, Privation, and Original Sin4. Descartes and the Evil of Error5. Leibniz and Theodicy: Evil as the Good Part II: From Autonomous Reason to History6. Kant on Radical Evil7. Schelling and the Metaphysics of Evil8. Nietzsche and the Genealogy of Evil Part III: Socialisation and Psychoanalysis9. Arendt on Evil: From the Radical to the Banal10. Lacan and the Symbolic Function of Evil11. Castoriadis: Evil and the Social Imaginary Part IV. The Subjects of Evil12. The Perpetrators of Evil13. Remembering the Victims ConclusionBibliographyIndex

Rae eschews what he calls the divide between pre- and post-Kantian conceptualizations of evil [...] and aims to show that theological language, assumptions, and motifs are implicit in secular analyses of evil.