Do you? Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Lever Hume Trust, online at

W.W. History of Philosophy.net. Today's episode A Decorated

Corps, Plotinus on matter and evil.

Are you a pessimistic sort of person?

When you look at a glass that has been filled to the halfway point with water, do you think, water? Is that the best they can offer me?

When life gives you lemons, do you make lemonade, but then refuse to drink it,

realizing you would really have preferred the water after all?

Among the seven dwarfs in Snow White, do you most identify with grumpy?

Most of the dwarfs seem to have no sophisticated views about the world, contenting themselves with

sneezing or sleeping. Let's face it, Dopi more or less sets the tone.

Happy is an exception, but he is clearly deluding himself. At least Grumpy has the courage to face the world as it is.

It's a world of wicked stepmothers, of poisonous apples with worms in them. Grumpy knows that life can be a nightmare

and that Prince Charming is not coming to wake us up. The undeniable fact that the world around us is full of suffering and evil has always presented a challenge to philosophers of a more optimistic bent.

In contemporary philosophy, it is most familiar in the form of the so-called problem of evil.

Actually, there are several problems of evil, only two of which really feature in philosophy nowadays. The more dramatic of the two is called the logical

problem of evil and claims that there is a straightforward contradiction between the existence of evil

and the existence of a perfectly good, all-powerful, and the existence of a perfectly good, all-powerful, and all-knowing God.

The thought is that a God who was perfectly good would want to avoid any evil that he knew about and could avoid, but the God we're considering knows

everything and can do anything, so there can't be any evil that escapes his notice or his power. Yet we see that there is evil.

Thus God, at least as described, doesn't exist.

Since the God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam seems to fit the description, perfectly good,

omniscient and omnipotent, the logical problem of evil accuses adherents of these

...