Hi! This is kind of random but I saw the post about your What Is Evil class and was wondering if you have any recorded lectures or the reading list? I just think it would be an interesting thing to read about and I'm nerdy like that lol 😅 no worries if not!
You know, you are the second person to ask me for this list. And I am always happy to help out a fellow nerd. Sadly, there are no recording I know of for this course but I do have the readings.
Our main book was Being Evil: A Philosophical Perspective by Luke Russell which I found to be a really good starting place for the discussion of what is Evil. I will add the rest of the readings under a read more split cause the list is long. Here it goes:
-Brothers Grimm: Hansel and Gretel; How Some Children Played at Slaughtering; The Little Red Cap; Little Snow White; Bluebeard; The Crows
-Richard Bernstein, The Abuse of Evil, pp. 53-67
-Malcom Gladwell, “Sacred and Profane,” The New Yorker: March 24, 2014
-Daniel K. Williams, Defenders of the Unborn, pp. 1-9
-Livy on the Bacchanalian conspiracy
-Elie Wiesel, Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, 1986
-Genesis, 1-3
-“An Irenaean Theodicy,” in In: Badham P. (ed) A John Hick Reader. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 1990
-Stephen de Wijze, “Insights from the Problem of ‘Dirty Hands’,” The Monist 85.2 (2002) 210-38
-Thucydides, "Melian dialogue" and "Civil strife on Corcyra"
-Euripides, Trojan Women
-Seneca, Thyestes, tr. Emily Wilson in Seneca: Six Tragedies, Oxford: 2010
-Euripides, Medea, tr. C.A.E. Luschnig
-Erich Fromm, “The Present Human Condition,” The American Scholar 25, no. 1 (1955): 29-35.
-Sophocles, Philoctetes, tr. David Grene, Complete Greek Tragedies, Chicago: 1957
-Selections from Hannah Arendt, “Eichmann in Jerusalem” The New Yorker, February 9, 1963
-Hannah Pitkin, “Relativism, a lecture,” Journal of Social Philosophy, 1994, 25:176-87
-Paul Elie, “What do the Church’s Victims Deserve?” The New Yorker, April 8, 2019
Those are the all readings on our syllabus (minus the ones that were selections that he put together and gave to us that I can't find). You can find copies of most of these as PDFs on various site or copies of the books at your local library. Most the these are Classics-based (aka Ancient Greek and Roman) since it was a course in our Classics and World Religions department. Please let me know if you have any more questions about the readings or any other such topics. Especially the classics based ones, it's what I have my degree in and I'm always happy to talk about them and their contexts. Sharing knowledge is my favorite thing to do. I hope you enjoy your evil reading!
so random but i saw your post about the “what is evil” class on insta and now i absolutely must know if it was at ou, because i also took that class and referred to it as my evil class, and the prof also called us evil students (miss that guy)
Yeah it was. I miss him too, he was a fantastic professor! It was so sad when he retired.
Thanks for the ask, it's always good to see a fellow bobcat!
