Susan Neiman
Susan Neiman (; born March 27, 1955) is an American moral philosopher, cultural commentator, and essayist. She has written extensively on the juncture between Enlightenment moral philosophy, metaphysics, and politics, both for scholarly audiences and the general public. She currently lives in Germany, where she is the Director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam. Biography and career. Born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, Neiman dropped out of high school to join the anti-Vietnam War movement. Later she studied philosophy at Harvard University, earning her Ph.D. under the direction of John Rawls and Stanley Cavell. During graduate school, she  spent several years of study at the Free University of Berlin. "Slow Fire", a memoir about her life as a Jewish woman in 1980s Berlin, appeared in 1992. From 1989 to 1996 she was an assistant and associate professor of philosophy at Yale University, and from 1996 to 2000 she was an associate professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University. In 2000 she assumed her current position at the Einstein Forum in Potsdam. She is the mother of three grown children. Neiman has been a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, a Research Fellow at  the Rockefeller Foundation Study Center in Bellagio, and a Senior Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. She is now a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Her books have won prizes from PEN, the Association of American Publishers, and the American Academy of Religion. Her shorter pieces have appeared in "The New York Times", "The Boston Globe", "The Globe and Mail", and "Dissent". In Germany, she has written for "Die Zeit", "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung", and "Freitag", among other publications. Neiman belongs to a small number of women who have risen to public prominence in  the male-dominated field of philosophy. Major works. Evil in Modern Thought "Evil in Modern Thought" writes the history of modern philosophy as a series of responses to the existence of evil – that which, whether in the form of innocent suffering or human action intentionally causing it, "threatens our sense of the sense of the world." Neiman argues that the problem of evil provides a better framework than epistemology for understanding the history of philosophy because it includes a wider range of texts, forms a link between metaphysics and ethics, and is more faithful to philosophers' stated concerns. Indeed, Neiman  believes that evil, by challenging the intelligibility of the world as a whole, lies at the root of all philosophical inquiry. The book explores the period from the early Enlightenment to the late 20th century through discussions of philosophers who often figure in traditional histories of philosophy, such as Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer, as well ones who do not, such as Pierre Bayle, Sigmund Freud, Albert Camus, Emmanuel Levinas, and Hannah Arendt. Neiman groups thinkers around two basic distinctions: one between those who believe in a guiding order beyond appearances and those who think that sensory experience is  all we have for orientation; and another between those who believe we must try to understand evil and those who maintain that doing so would be immoral on the grounds that any explanation of evil would be tantamount to its justification. Moral Clarity In "Moral Clarity", Neiman argues that all human beings have moral needs but that secular culture, particularly on the political left, is reluctant or unable to satisfy them, and as a consequence has ceded the moral domain to religion and traditional conservatives. She attributes this failing not to a lack of values but to a lack of  a "standpoint from which those values make sense." The book explores the reasons why this is so and offers a new framework for moral thinking based on Enlightenment ideas, particularly those of Kant and Rousseau, which rely neither on divine authority nor on authoritarian ideology. Why Grow Up? In "Why Grow Up", Neiman challenges the infantilism that she believes is widespread in modern society. She suggests that the "forces that shape our world" encourage consumerism, apathy, cynicism, and the fetishization of beauty and youth in order to keep citizens passive and compliant. These, she thinks, are propped up by a  conception of adulthood in which being an adult is synonymous with drudgery, resignation, and inevitable decline. Neiman makes the case for an ideal of adulthood that involves exercising judgement, understanding one's own culture through immersion in others, actively shaping society, and seeking orientation in the face of uncertainty. As in "Moral Clarity", Neiman draws on the work of Kant, Rousseau, Arendt, and other philosophers to argue for a concept of maturity in which thinking critically does not mean abandoning one's ideals. Learning from the Germans "Learning from the Germans" examines German efforts to atone for Nazi atrocities and  identifies lessons for how the U.S. might come to terms with its legacy of slavery and racism. The book brings together historical and philosophical analysis; interviews with politicians, activists, and contemporary witnesses in Germany and the United States; and Neiman's own first-person observations as a white woman growing up in the South and a Jewish woman who has lived for almost three decades in Berlin. Awards and honors. In 2014 Neiman was the recipient of the International Spinoza Prize and an honorary doctorate from the University of Sankt Gallen. She delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at  the University of Michigan in 2010. In 2018, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society, and received the Lucius D. Clay Medal for her contributions to German-American relations.