PHI 333 The Concepts of Evil

The purpose of this course is to explores and critically examine the most prominent interpretations of the phenomenon of evil put forward by the great philosophical, political, and religious thinkers of humanity. The unprecedented eruption of evil that occurred in our part of the world in the context of the 20th Century totalitarianisms, the ongoing horrors of genocides, ethnic cleansings, and terrorist atrocities, as well as the universality of the experience of evil in individual lives of people across times and cultures, makes reflection on evil a good point of departure in the global search for the common moral ground in our increasingly fragmented and yet increasingly interconnected world. For this reason this course, while focusing primarily on the concepts of evil developed within the Western intellectual tradition, explores also the Asian contributions to the human thinking about the sources and the nature of evil.