MA, Kent State University, 2015, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of Philosophy

My project is to establish a secularized concept of evil by filtering F.W.J. Schelling's philosophy through that of Martin Heidegger. Schelling's philosophy is essential to my project, because he seeks to claim a positive ontological status for evil, as do I. Schelling's evil, despite its religious context, is not mired in concepts of malformation, or even original sin, as is the evil of his predecessors. I offer Aristotle and Immanuel Kant as Schelling's key secular predecessors, in whose philosophies we find the beginnings of Schelling's free-will theodicy. Similarly, Schelling stands apart from modern theodicy—that is, from G.W. Leibniz, who coined the term “theodicy”—in three key ways: Schelling focuses on human beings, rather than on God; he embraces nature, rather than seeking to overcome it, which requires that he also embrace chaos; and he insists that evil has a positive ontological status, rather than a negative one. These departures show the influence of both Kant and Aristotle on Schelling's conception of evil. Over the course of this project, we will find that when we uncover evil's positive ontology and lay bare its actualization by humans, we ground an approach to evil suited to the political necessities of the twenty-first century. That is, we see that a proper philosophical understanding of evil necessarily calls us to a political address of the same. What the evils of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have shown us, especially, is that a stronger, positive conception of evil enables us to assign accountability more effectively to those who commit evil acts. Hence, crafting a positive conception of evil outside of a theological framework will necessitate a moral framework. To that end, I engage the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche and Hannah Arendt in order to make clear the implications of an ontologically positive evil and draw conclusions regarding the best concept of evil for a contemporary context. My view is that the best concept of (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Gina Zavota PhD (Advisor); Kim Garchar PhD (Committee Member); Michael Byron PhD (Committee Member); Tammy Clewell PhD (Other) Subjects: Philosophy