Introduction

In Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy, Susan Neiman traces the history of modern philosophy – and of Kant's pivotal role in that history – along a trajectory shaped by the problem of evil rather than by the problems of knowledge, certainty, and doubt that have been the staple of standard readings of that history. She characterizes Kant's account of our human circumstances as a “metaphysic of permanent rupture” in which

In this essay I plan to show how the duality that Neiman marks out as “the dissonance and conflict at the heart of experience” functions to outline the contours of a philosophical anthropology that is embedded in Kant's critical project. The spatio-temporally embodied freedom of finite human reason stands at the conceptual center of this anthropology and serves as locus for Kant's account of evil. That account exhibits evil as marking a fissure that lies athwart human efforts to render fully intelligible the world that presents itself to us, in our embodied freedom, both as nature – an object for reason's theoretical inquiry – and as freedom – a field for human action shaped by reason's moral exercise.