The roots of evil are often held to be Biblical, but philosophers in ancient China and Greece were thoroughly conversant with both the phenomena and the languages of evil. This volume provides a comparative examination of patterns of evil in ancient Chinese and Greek philosophy.
With no genealogical connections to rely on, the comparativist must establish a framework to connect these traditions. This volume utilizes the notion of "patterns" to address worries of methodological and ethical incommensurability, and to show what this means for the practice of comparative philosophy. In the case of evil, this methodology requires diving deep into the linguistic and political murk where evil lurks, with its deep roots in human dispositions for experience and action. The nine chapters are arranged in two parts. Those of Part I are written by scholars with a strong background in comparative philosophy and offer a substantial analysis of how both traditions respond to a specific aspect of the phenomenology of evil. Those of Part II are “twinned” chapters, that is, chapters that discuss similar topics in close dialogue with one another, but each does it from within either of these traditions. The volume is concluded with a reflection on the varieties of comparative strategies employed in the nine chapters.
Patterns of Evil in Ancient Chinese and Greek Philosophy will appeal to scholars and graduate students interested in comparative philosophy, ancient Greek philosophy, early Chinese philosophy, and the problem of evil quite generally.
Table of Contents:
Introduction Part 1: Wavering on Evil: Comparative Approaches 1. Ugliness or Evil? Notes on a Moral Wobble in Aristotle and the Xunzi 2. Ambiguities of ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’: Moral Sophistry in Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Plato’s Euthydemus 3. Bad Rulers in Sextus Empiricus and Zhuāngzǐ—and What to Do About Them 4. Stoics on Badness in the Perfect World (and Early Daoism) 5. Chinese and Greek Accounts of Mobile Spirits and Protection from Harm Part 2: Patterns of Evil: Twinned Studies 6. Fair and Foul in Chinese Philosophy 7. Three Patterns of Evil in Plato 8. “Are we the baddies?” Some Preliminary Considerations on the Evil Rulers Jie and Zhòu in Ancient Chinese Philosophical Texts 9. The Phalaris Case: Aristotle and Beyond Afterword
About the Author :
R.A.H. King is a full Professor for the History of Philosophy at the University of Berne, Switzerland. Previously, he taught philosophy at the Universities of Glasgow and Munich. He is the author of Aristotle on life and death (2001), Aristotle and Plotinus on Memory (2009), and “The Lord a Lord, the Minister a Minister, the Father a Father, the Son a Son.” Virtues and Roles in Ancient Greek and Chinese Thought (forthcoming). He has edited Common to Body and Soul Philosophical Approaches to Explaining Living Behaviour in Greco-Roman Antiquity (2006), How Should One Live? Comparing Ethics in Ancient China and Greco-Roman Antiquity (with Dennis Schilling) (2011), The Good Life and Conceptions of Life in Early China and Graeco-Roman Antiquity (2015). He is one of the translators of Plotinus in the Cambridge Plotinus (ed. Lloyd Gerson 2018, 2nd ed. 2024). He has published many articles on early Chinese ethics, especially in comparison with Greek ethics.
Pavlos Kontos is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Patras. His recent publications include Aristotle on the Scope of Practical Reason (Routledge: 2021), (ed.) Evil in Aristotle (2018), Phenomenology and the Primacy of the Political: Essays in Honor of Jacques Taminiaux (co-editor; 2017), and Aristotle's Moral Realism Reconsidered (Routledge: 2013). His Introduction to Aristotle's Ethics, originally published in Modern Greek with the title The two eu of eutuchia (2018, 2023), has been translated into English and Chinese. Kontos is the co-editor, alongside C.D.C. Reeve, of Aristotle: Complete Works (2025).
