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The best of all possible worlds: a story of philosophers, God, and evil

Steven M. Nadler

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2008)

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False Optimism? Leibniz, Evil, and the Best of all Possible Worlds.Lloyd Strickland - 2010 - Forum Philosophicum: International Journal for Philosophy 15 (1):17-35.details Leibniz’s claim that this is the best of all possible worlds has been subject to numerous criticisms, both from his contemporaries and ours. In this paper I investigate a cluster of such criticisms based on the existence, abundance or character of worldly evil. As several Leibniz-inspired versions of optimism have been advanced in recent years, the aim of my investigation is to assess not just how Leibniz’s brand of optimism fares against these criticisms, but also whether optimism as a philosophy (...) Download Export citation Bookmark
False Optimism? Leibniz, Evil, and the Best of all Possible Worlds.Lloyd Strickland - 2010 - Forum Philosophicum: International Journal for Philosophy 15 (1):17-35.details Leibniz’s claim that this is the best of all possible worlds has been subject to numerous criticisms, both from his contemporaries and ours. In this paper I investigate a cluster of such criticisms based on the existence, abundance or character of worldly evil. As several Leibniz-inspired versions of optimism have been advanced in recent years, the aim of my investigation is to assess not just how Leibniz’s brand of optimism fares against these criticisms, but also whether optimism as a philosophy (...) Download Export citation Bookmark
Reductio ad Malum.Michael W. Hickson - 2011 - Modern Schoolman 88 (3-4):201-221.details Pierre Bayle is perhaps most well-known for arguing in his Dictionary (1697) that the problem of evil cannot be solved by reason alone. This skepticism about theodicy is usually credited to a religious crisis suffered by Bayle in 1685 following the unjust imprisonment and death of his brother, the death of his father, and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. But in this paper I argue that Bayle was skeptical about theodicy a decade earlier than these events, from at (...) Download Export citation Bookmark
Leibniz’s and Herder’s philosophy of optimism.Vasil Gluchman - 2021 - Ethics and Bioethics (in Central Europe) 11 (1-2):37-47.details The author studies Leibniz’s views of vindicating God for the existence of evil in the world, as well as the idea of the best of all possible worlds, including the past and present criticism. Following Leibniz, he opted for the presentation of Herder’s philosophy of history as one of the most significant forms of philosophical optimism that influenced the first half of the 19th century, including contemporary debates on and critiques of the topic. He defines Herder’s concept as the philosophy (...) Download Export citation Bookmark

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