Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Letter to Mr. de Voltaire

Enlightenment Era Writers, Responses to the Problem of Evil & the Problem of Pain

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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