An intellectual history of the philosophers who grappled with the problem of evil, and the case for why pessimism still holds moral value for us today In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, philosophers engaged in heated debates on the question of how God could have allowed evil and suffering in a creation that is supposedly good. Dark Matters traces how the competing philosophical traditions of optimism and pessimism arose from early modern debates about the problem of evil, and makes a (...) compelling case for the rediscovery of pessimism as a source for compassion, consolation, and perhaps even hope. Bringing to life one of the most vibrant eras in the history of philosophy, Mara van der Lugt discusses legendary figures such as Leibniz, Hume, Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, and Schopenhauer. She also introduces readers to less familiar names, such as Bayle, King, La Mettrie, and Maupertuis. Van der Lugt describes not only how the earliest optimists and pessimists were deeply concerned with finding an answer to the question of the value of existence that does justice to the reality of human suffering, but also how they were fundamentally divided over what such an answer should look like. A breathtaking work of intellectual history by one of today's leading scholars, Dark Matters reveals how the crucial moral aim of pessimism is to find a way of speaking about suffering that offers consolation and does justice to the fragility of life. (shrink)

ABSTRACTTaking its cue from Hannah Arendt’s comment that ‘truth gets lost in the Enlightenment’ and Lessing’s parable of God’s ‘left hand’, this paper traces a historical shift in moral and religious thought: roughly from truth to sincerity. From traditional conceptions of conscience as conditional on the objective truth of its content, the paper moves on, via the Reformation and seventeenth-century Augustinian turn, to early modern debates on toleration and the ‘erring conscience’. It is argued that Pierre Bayle’s Commentaire Philosophique of (...) 1686 can be read as a crucial catalogue for understanding the substitution of truth with sincerity : so that not truth but truthfulness is considered to be essential for moral and religious justification. Moving from Bayle to Immanuel Kant, the paper then shows how many of the same questions rise in Kant’s late essay on theodicy, which is also an essay on sincerity or integrity, via the Book of Job. Through these two thinkers, various themes are connected: from conscience and sincerity to the problem of the conscientious persecutor. Finally, these themes of truth, error and integrity are linked to the modern debate on authenticity, and a framework is proposed for conceptualising these various shifts. (shrink)

In his own day, the name of Pierre Bayle was as famous as that of any philosopher in Europe. Yet despite his vast influence on the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, Bayle's name was eclipsed by those of other, more methodical thinkers of his age, eliciting the following remark from one modern scholar, J.C. Laursen: 'Why do professional philosophers spend so much time on Descartes and so little time on Pierre Bayle, when Bayle was clearly the better philosopher?'In the past (...) decades a surge of new interest in Bayle has led to the rediscovery of the depth of his philosophical thought as well as the extent of his influence-yet the scholarly debate is shadowed by deep uncertainty as to how to tackle his eclectic writings, especially the expansive historical-philosophical publication that became one of the Enlightenment's best-sellers: the Dictionnaire Historique et Critique, first published in 1696 and counting more than six million words.This volume provides an important new study of both Bayle and the Dictionnaire. (shrink)

Few assumptions, argues Mara van der Lugt, are so stagnant, so rigid, so deeply walled in as the assumption that the decision to have children is by default a good thing; that having children is one of the most elevated aspects of human activity, and, indeed, of the human condition. This book is conceived as an open and reflective challenge to that assumption. The author argues that there are two questions in life that every person needs to answer for themselves: (...) one is the question of religion; the other is the question of begetting, a term which she chooses deliberately to restore a sense of 'strangeness and magnitude' to the idea. What does it mean to bring a new creature into the world? Or rather what does it mean to decide to perform an act of creation? What does it mean to make the decision that life is worth living on behalf of a person who cannot be consulted? To ask this question is to interrogate one's own responsibility and commitments, morally, philosophically, and personally. The question of begetting can never be purely one of preference or inclination, however we might wish it to be. This book is the author's attempt to raise some of these questions, if not fully to answer them. It is both a personal and philosophical exercise of filling out that moral background, in full awareness of the things that are at stake, and not in judgment but out of concern and compassion both for creators and created, and for those who are not yet created and those who are not (or not yet) creators. (shrink)

Central to this volume are two philosophical powerhouses of the early modern period: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Pierre Bayle. Born in, respectively, 1646 and 1647, both made for an astonishing career in a variety of scholarly disciplines and reached, if not equal, then certainly comparable fame in the course of their lives. Nowadays, Bayle's reputation is eclipsed by that of Leibniz, who is the focus of yearly conferences and libraries of scholarship, while Bayle had to await the later twentieth century (...) to be rediscovered. He has since been at the center of a quickly expanding body of scholarship, which continues to be sharply divided over the vexed question how to interpret his religious stance.This imbalance... (shrink)