Echoes from the Holocaust: Philosophical Reflections on a Dark TimeTemple University Press, 2009 - 472 pages The murder of six million Jewish men, women, and children during World War II was an act of such barbarity as to constitute one of the central events of our time; yet a list of the major concerns of professional philosophers since 1945 would exclude the Holocaust. This collection of twenty-three essays, most of which were written expressly for this volume, is the first book to focus comprehensively on the profound issues and philosophical significance of the Holocaust. The essays, written for general as well as professional readers, convey an extraordinary range of factual information and philosophical reflection in seeking to identify the haunting meanings of the Holocaust. Among the questions addressed are: How should philosophy approach the Holocaust? What part did the philosophical climate play in allowing Hitlerism its temporary triumph? What is the philosophical climate today and what are its probable cultural effects? Can philosophy help our culture to become a bulwark against future agents of evil? The multiple dimensions of the Holocaust-historical, sociological, psychological, religious, moral, and literary-are collected here for concentrated philosophical interpretations. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 76
Page 4
... tion of a structure upon discrete past events in order to create an ordered meaningful image of the past . What the so abundant evidence cannot show , what necessarily is inaccessible to direct observations , are the connections that ...
... tion of a structure upon discrete past events in order to create an ordered meaningful image of the past . What the so abundant evidence cannot show , what necessarily is inaccessible to direct observations , are the connections that ...
Page 7
... tion as an explanation disappeared from historical writing . But value commitment and mode of interpretation are still joined together . A Marxist may interpret anti - Semitism as a defense of a capitalistic class , seeking to focus ...
... tion as an explanation disappeared from historical writing . But value commitment and mode of interpretation are still joined together . A Marxist may interpret anti - Semitism as a defense of a capitalistic class , seeking to focus ...
Page 9
... tion of the Jewish prophetic tradition . The two primary components of that tradition were the transformation of a tribal , jealous , and vengeful God into a universal one who is God not to a particular people but to all of humanity ...
... tion of the Jewish prophetic tradition . The two primary components of that tradition were the transformation of a tribal , jealous , and vengeful God into a universal one who is God not to a particular people but to all of humanity ...
Page 13
... tion of anti - Semitism with the political Right is systematically ex- pressed . All Jewish political commitment is only a device to gain power . Both capitalism and communism are means to the identical end — hence the logic of Hitler ...
... tion of anti - Semitism with the political Right is systematically ex- pressed . All Jewish political commitment is only a device to gain power . Both capitalism and communism are means to the identical end — hence the logic of Hitler ...
Page 17
... tion of Russian unpreparedness and the need for security , while Ger- many wished to avoid a two - front war . Hitler expected that France and England would not fight for Poland . The declarations of war on Germany by France and England ...
... tion of Russian unpreparedness and the need for security , while Ger- many wished to avoid a two - front war . Hitler expected that France and England would not fight for Poland . The declarations of war on Germany by France and England ...
Contents
3 | |
51 | |
53 | |
WHAT PHILOSOPHY CAN AND CANNOT SAY ABOUT EVIL | 91 |
LIBERALISM AND THE HOLOCAUST An Essay on Trust and the BlackJewish Relationship | 105 |
THE DILEMMA OF CHOICE IN THE DEATHCAMPS | 118 |
ON THE IDEA OF MORAL PATHOLOGY | 128 |
THE RIGHT WAY TO ACT Indicting the Victims | 149 |
THE CONCEPT OF GOD AFTER AUSCHWITZ A Jewish Voice | 292 |
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MAN AFTER AUSCHWITZ | 306 |
CONCENTRATION CAMPS AND THE END OF THE LIFEWORLD | 327 |
LANGUAGE AND GENOCIDE | 341 |
Challenges to the Understanding | 363 |
SOCIAL SCIENCE TECHNIQUES AND THE STUDY OF CONCENTRATION CAMPS | 365 |
THE CRISIS IN KNOWING AND UNDERSTANDING THE HOLOCAUST | 379 |
THE POLITICS OF SYMBOLIC EVASION Germany and the Aftermath of the Holocaust | 396 |
ON LOSING TRUST IN THE WORLD | 163 |
ETHICS EVIL AND THE FINAL SOLUTION | 181 |
Echoes from the Death Camps | 199 |
THE HOLOCAUST AS A TEST OF PHILOSOPHY | 201 |
THE HOLOCAUST AND HUMAN PROGRESS | 223 |
THE HOLOCAUST MORAL THEORY AND IMMORAL ACTS | 245 |
TECHNOLOGY AND GENOCIDE Technology as a Form of Life | 262 |
THE ABUSE OF HOLOCAUST STUDIES Mercy Killing and the Slippery Slope | 412 |
THE INCOMPREHENSIBILITY OF THE HOLOCAUST Tightening up Some Loose Usage | 421 |
STUDYING THE HOLOCAUSTS IMPACT TODAY Some Dilemmas of Language and Method | 432 |
THE CONTRIBUTORS | 443 |
INDEX | 447 |
Other editions - View all
Echoes from the Holocaust: Philosophical Reflections on a Dark Time Alan Rosenberg No preview available - 1990 |
Echoes from the Holocaust: Philosophical Reflections on a Dark Time Alan Rosenberg,Gerald Eugene Myers No preview available - 1988 |
Common terms and phrases
action Alan Rosenberg anti-Semitism Arendt Ariel Auschwitz authority become behavior believe bureaucratic Christian committed concentration camp concept concern context culture Dawidowicz death camps destruction Eichmann Einsatzgruppen Elie Wiesel Endlösung essay ethical European euthanasia event evidence evil example existence experience explain extermination Fackenheim fact Final Solution Franz Stangl gas chambers genocide German ghetto Hannah Arendt happened Hilberg Himmler historians Hitler Holocaust horror human Ibid idea ideology incomprehensible individual issue Jewish Jewry Jews Judenrat Kren labor language life-world live mass murder means mercy killing Milgram modern moral indifference moral pathology motives National nature Nazism never party person philosophy political possible prisoners problem progress psychological question Raul Hilberg reality reason resistance responsibility role Rudolf Höss rules sense Sereny significant social morality society Stangl suggest survive survivors Third Reich tion Treblinka unique University Press values victims York
Popular passages
Page 95 - ... all sorts of things you can't imagine. People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that's a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that's all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it.
Page 335 - They crowd my memory with their faceless presences, and if I could enclose all the evil of our time in one image, I would choose this image which is familiar to me: an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of a thought is to be seen.
Page 273 - All the men must be fed, sheltered and treated in such a way as to exploit them to the highest possible extent at the lowest conceivable degree of expenditure...
Page 225 - The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
Page 248 - And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shall not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shall surely die.
Page 120 - ... abnormal response and another, both imposed by a situation that was in no way of the victim's own choosing.
Page 215 - After witnessing hundreds of ordinary people submit to the authority in our own experiments, I must conclude that Arendt's conception of the banality of evil comes closer to the truth than one might dare imagine.
Page 328 - The world is pregiven to us, the waking, always somehow practically interested subjects, not occasionally but always and necessarily as the universal field of all actual and possible praxis, as horizon. To live is always to live-in-certainty-of-the-world.
Page 95 - ... a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that's all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it. These Turks took a pleasure in torturing children, too ; cutting the unborn child from the mother's womb, and tossing babies up in the air and catching them on the points of their bayonets before their mother's eyes. Doing it before the mother's eyes was what gave zest to the amusement.