The Problem of Evil in Philosophy and Popular Culture

“Why do bad things happen to good people, and good things to bad?” Given the problem’s deep and wide-ranging roots in intellectual history, we can’t reasonably aspire to sample it all. Rather, we’ll adopt a more episodic approach—an exploration of the problem’s conventional touchstone, the Book of Job, and a selection of its literary and cinematic adaptations; the development in the eighteenth century of a secular version of the problem, in addition to the more traditional theological one, and an array of “optimistic” and “pessimistic” responses; the popular culture that emerges in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, including the gothic, dystopia, and superhero traditions; the post-Holocaust Nuremberg and Adolf Eichmann trials, Hannah Arendt’s watershed Eichmann in Jerusalem, and the popular culture that emerges in the wake of Eichmann and Eichmann; finally, an array of contemporary interventions chosen cooperatively.