We badly need alternative histories of philosophy. The story told (by me, among others) about philosophy from Descartes to Hegel being dominated by the problematic of epistemological skepticism cries out for supplementation, though not necessarily for replacement. Neiman sees the great figures of this period as worrying more about evil than about knowledge. Ever since Plato, she says, "the worry that fueled debates about the difference between appearance and reality was not the fear that the world might not turn out to be the way it seems to us—but rather the fear that it would."

That is a good example of Neiman's snazzy prose, which makes this book a pleasure to read, as well as an immensely welcome change from the sort of history of philosophy to which we Anglophones have grown accustomed. (The Germans, as she points out, are better at this sort of thing; compare Copleston to Blumenberg, for example.)

Neiman is very successful at reminding us that everybody down to Hegel took theodicy very seriously, but less so when she suggests that contemporary thinkers should still ponder the nature and cause of evil. Her claim that twentieth-century intellectuals were to Auschwitz as eighteenth-century intellectuals were to Lisbon works for some people, such as Adorno, but hardly for all. Lisbon impugned God, but Auschwitz only impugned Inevitable Progress, which not all that many people ever believed in anyway.

—Richard Rorty（理查·罗蒂）