Good and Evil / Gut und Böse
A Dialectical Ethics
The good has two opposites: the bad and the evil. Badness is that which deviates from its inner measure, while evil is that which negates and resists goodness. Evil is not the deviation from a measure but enmity toward the measure, counter-measure. It is to the good not as black is to white, but as non-being is to being. This opposition – the contradictory opposition – does not occur in nature. Knowledge of good and evil is therefore firstly and fundamentally the knowledge that goodness is not...
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The good has two opposites: the bad and the evil. Badness is that which deviates from its inner measure, while evil is that which negates and resists goodness. Evil is not the deviation from a measure but enmity toward the measure, counter-measure. It is to the good not as black is to white, but as non-being is to being. This opposition – the contradictory opposition – does not occur in nature. Knowledge of good and evil is therefore firstly and fundamentally the knowledge that goodness is not nature, and that thus, a life lived through the notion of the good is not a natural life. Sebastian Rödl’s new book articulates the forms of human and non-human life as right, conscience, and gift.
2025, 400 pages
Persons
Sebastian Rödl
Author
Sebastian Rödl was born in 1967, studied philosophy, musicology, German philology, and history at Goethe University Frankfurt and at the FU Berlin. After completing his PhD in 1997 with the work Selbstbezug und Normativität (Self-Reference and Normativity), he spent a year and a half as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pittsburgh. In 2003, he completed his Habilitation with the work Kategorien des Zeitlichen (Categories of Temporality) at Leipzig University. After guest professorships at the University of Chicago and the New School University New York, he received a Heisenberg grant from the DFG and was an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. From 2005 to 2012, he was a professor of philosophy at the University of Basel, and since...
Sebastian Rödl
Author
Sebastian Rödl was born in 1967, studied philosophy, musicology, German philology, and history at Goethe University Frankfurt and at the FU Berlin....
© Tom Thiele