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On Evil
- Narrated by: David Thorn
- Length: 5 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged Audiobook
- Categories: Politics & Social Sciences, Philosophy
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Summary
For many enlightened, liberal-minded thinkers today, and for most on the political left, evil is an outmoded concept. It smacks too much of absolute judgements and metaphysical certainties to suit the modern age. In this witty, accessible study, the prominent Marxist thinker Terry Eagleton launches a surprising defence of the reality of evil, drawing on literary, theological, and psychoanalytic sources to suggest that evil, no mere medieval artifact, is a real phenomenon with palpable force in our contemporary world.
In a book that ranges from St. Augustine to alcoholism, Thomas Aquinas to Thomas Mann, Shakespeare to the Holocaust, Eagleton investigates the frightful plight of those doomed souls who apparently destroy for no reason. In the process, he poses a set of intriguing questions. Is evil really a kind of nothingness? Why should it appear so glamorous and seductive? Why does goodness seem so boring? Is it really possible for human beings to delight in destruction for no reason at all?
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- Leon
- 02-06-18
A BRILLIANT MIND
When a brilliant mind delves into a topic it leaves one enlightened, sometimes uncomfortable, but mostly amazed. And this is Terry Eagleton. He tugs at one's paradigm, and does it very well.
A very good read. !
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- Mack Eulet
- 08-07-18
Wow. Magnificent book
this book is intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually clarifying, as well as intensely funny at times. Eagleton is brilliant, witty, and a good sam
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- Drone Boy
- 24-07-21
One view of evil
This is a good philosophical, religious, literary, and political account of the genealogy of evil, but it lacks any connection to biology, ecology, history, or systems theory, and seems to hold than evil can understand from a purely humanist standpoint. This makes the discourse fairly monolithic, descriptive, moralistic, and reliant upon the author's stylistic flair and critical skills to carry the argument. There is not account of evil as the bi-product of complex economic relationships, which is where it seems to emerge in both nature and culture.