Showing results by author "Abigail L Rosenthal" in All Categories

I would like this podcast to start a conversation with women of all ages, convictions and styles of life – wherever situated on the gamut of experience. In principle, there is no bar to men joining in, since how one defines women has a lot to do with what it means to be a man. But it is women I invite to pull up a chair at this virtual café table and put their questions and views into the conversation. Abigail L. Rosenthal is Professor Emerita of Philosophy, Brooklyn College of The City University of New York. She is the author of A Good Look at Evil, a Pulitzer Prize nominee, now ...

Hannah Arendt’s posthumous influence continues to be enormous, even though her best-known claims have been refuted by new evidence. The real story, of a talented woman - simultaneously sustaining a hidden love affair and maintaining the posture of a disinterested public intellectual - is also a story of moral upendings and reversals. It is the back story. It is time for thoughtful listeners to know it. 

The recent philosophic literature that revives the case for theism does not ordinarily take in the evidence for providential intervention that’s to be found in ordinary experience. For many people, such experience has tremendous impact, yet to date, philosophy has offered no warrant for treating it as anything other than a subjective view of what, objectively, remains mere coincidence.

We meet with evil in the ordinary course of experience, as we try to live our life stories. It's not a myth. It's a mysterious but quite real phenomenon. How can we recognize it? How can we learn to resist it? Amazingly, philosophers have not been much help. A Good look at Evil maps the actual terrain - of lived ideas and situations - showing how to recognize evil for what it is: The perennial and present threat to a good life.