Overview

Charting a sweeping history of evil within the Western philosophical tradition, Gavin Rae shows that the problem of evil as a conceptual problem came to the fore with the rise of monotheism. Rae traces the problem of evil from early and Medieval Christian philosophy to modern philosophy, German Idealism, post-structuralism and contemporary analytic philosophy and secularisation.

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9781474445320

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Reviews

"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.-- ""Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal"" The idea of evil is at the centre of a lively philosophical debate, and this book is an important and distinctive contribution, providing a philosophical history of the concept in the western tradition. Ranging from the Christian tradition to the secular, and from philosophical approaches to the psychoanalytical, it provides an in-depth study of the key thinkers who have contributed to the historical roots of this debate.-- ""Phillip Cole, University of the West of England, Bristol"""

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.-- ""Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal"" The idea of evil is at the centre of a lively philosophical debate, and this book is an important and distinctive contribution, providing a philosophical history of the concept in the western tradition. Ranging from the Christian tradition to the secular, and from philosophical approaches to the psychoanalytical, it provides an in-depth study of the key thinkers who have contributed to the historical roots of this debate.-- ""Phillip Cole, University of the West of England, Bristol""

Author Information

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 is the author of eight monographs, the most recent of which are The Politics of Reason: A Postfoundational Approach (Edinburgh University Press, 2026), 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). He has also co-edited six volumes, the most recent of which are Subjective Agency and Poststructuralism (Routledge, 2025—with Cillian Ó Fathaigh), Philosophy across Borders (Routledge, 2025—with Emma Ingala), and Historical Traces and Future Pathways of Poststructuralism: Aesthetics, Ethics, Politics (Routledge, 2021—with Emma Ingala).

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