Title: The Problem of Evil beyond Theism
Lecturer: Franklin Perkins (Professor, Nanyang Technological University and DePaul University)
Chairperson: Paul D’Ambrosio (Assistant Professor, East China Normal University)
Date: 10 am, December 14th, 2017 (Thursday)
Venue: Room 5303, Building of School of Humanities, Minhang Campus, ECNU
Sponsor: Si-mian Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, ECNU
Abstract of the Lecture:
Across almost all world religions, one finds the claim that good people end up rewarded and bad people are punished. If we take the empirical basis of the problem of evil to be the fact that that bad things sometimes happen to good people or that bad people sometimes end up with flourishing lives threatens, then this problem exists for many religions and in many cultural contexts. The classical problem of evil as a question about God is just one particular manifestation of this broader problem. This lecture attempts to describe and categorize responses to this basic problem across a number of traditions, including Chinese and Indian philosophy.
Brief Introduction of the Lecturer:
Franklin Perkins received his Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University and has been a professor at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore) and at DePaul University (Chicago). His main teaching and research interests are in classical Chinese philosophy, early modern European philosophy, and in the challenges of doing philosophy in a comparative or intercultural context. He is the author of Heaven and Earth are not Humane: The Problem of Evil in Classical Chinese Philosophy (Indiana, 2014), Leibniz: A Guide for the Perplexed (Bloomsbury, 2007), and Leibniz and China: A Commerce of Light (Cambridge, 2004) (translated into Chinese as 《互照：莱布尼茨与中国》), and he was co-editor (with Chenyang Li) of Chinese Metaphysics and Its Problems (Cambridge, 2015). His books have been translated into Portuguese, Chinese, and Japanese. He is editor of the journal Philosophy East and West.