Showing results by narrator "Susan Neiman" in All Categories

If you’re woke, you’re left. If you’re left, you’re woke. We blur the terms, assuming that if you’re one you must be the other. That, Susan Neiman argues, is a dangerous mistake. The confusion arises because woke is fuelled by traditionally leftwing emotions: the wish to stand with the oppressed and marginalized, to address historic crimes. But those emotions are undermined by widespread philosophical assumptions with reactionary sources. As a result, wokeism conflicts with ideas that have guided the left for more than 200 years.

Evil threatens human reason, for it challenges our hope that the world makes sense. For 18th-century Europeans, the Lisbon earthquake was manifest evil. Today we view evil as a matter of human cruelty, and Auschwitz as its extreme incarnation. Examining our understanding of evil from the Inquisition to contemporary terrorism, Susan Neiman explores who we have become in the three centuries that separate us from the early Enlightenment. In the process, she rewrites the history of modern thought and points philosophy back to the questions that originally animated it.

What roles do race and religion play in the current election, and what do they say about America today? How do these roles affect the key issues concerning our country? The Class of 1943 Professor at Princeton University, Cornel West is one of America's most provocative public intellectuals and the author of Hope on a Tightrope.

Philosopher Susan Neiman is the director of the Einstein Forum in Berlin and the author of Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists.