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The empiricist, atheist German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) is best known for his 1818 work, The World as Will and Representation. In it, he responds to the problem of evil by inverting the Augustinian definition of evil as the privation of good. Happiness, Schopenhauer argued, is but the temporary cessation of suffering, which is the default condition […]
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German idealist Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) developed a system of logic around the concept of aufhebung. Aufhebung is the noun form of the German verb aufheben, which means “to keep,” “to cancel,” and “to pick up”. The tension between these senses is perhaps best captured in the English word sublation, a term that describes the
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The poetry of the esteemed English Romantic poet John Keats (1795–1821) had been in publication for only a few years when he died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-five. Insight into several of his most well-known poems can be found in letters Keats wrote to his brother and his brother’s spouse in 1819. In them,
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Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854) was one of the most influential German philosophers of the early 19th century. In “Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and Related Matters,” Schelling investigates a number of matters related to the problem of evil, including the following: man’s freedom to choose between good and evil suggests that
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The best-known theodicy based on principles of economics was written by Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834), an Anglican cleric and economist who made major contributions to the fields of political economy and demography. In An Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus observed that nations’ populations tend to grow more rapidly than their food supply, a situation
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In 1791, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), one of the preeminent German philosophers of the Enlightenment, addressed the problem of evil in an essay titled, “On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy.” In it, Kant categorizes theodicies into three general approaches: First, a theodicy can argue that what mankind considers to be “evil” is not,
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The Scottish philosopher and essayist David Hume (1711–1776) is known for his criticisms of various claims to religious knowledge, as well as for his naturalistic explanations of the origins of religious belief. In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in 1779, three philosophers—Demea, Philo, and Cleanthes—debate different arguments for the existence of God, along with various
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In 1756, Swiss-born philosopher and political theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) wrote a letter responding to Voltaire’s poem on the Lisbon earthquake—a poem in which Voltaire expressed a mix of intellectual and emotional discontent with the idea that human suffering on the scale of Lisbon’s can be reconciled with the existence of an omnipotent, beneficent God
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The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 is one of the most significant earthquakes in recorded history, killing tens of thousands in Lisbon, thousands more elsewhere in Portugal, and additional thousands in Spain and Morocco. While other earthquakes have resulted in more victims, none have produced greater intellectual shockwaves than the one in Lisbon. In the months
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First published in 1733, Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man became an international best-seller, appearing in over a hundred editions in eighteen languages across Europe. Pope’s response to the problem of evil in this poem relies heavily on the thought of ancient Greco-Roman philosophers (with an emphasis on Stoic and Plotinian thought), as well as medieval Christian theologians
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