Evil threatens human reason, for it challenges our hope that the world makes sense. For eighteenth-century Europeans, the Lisbon earthquake was manifest evil. Today we view evil as a matter of human cruelty, and Auschwitz as its extreme incarnation. In this book, Susan Neiman tells the history of modern philosophy as an attempt to come to terms with evil. She reintroduces philosophy to anyone interested in questions of life and death, good and evil, suffering and sense.