Thoughts of a dry brain

Just finished watching the final season of Strangers with Candy that my pal Jessie lent me. Good times, good times. It's a brilliant parody of afterschool specials and a reminder of what a terrifying Darwinian nightmare highschool was. Thanks, Jessie!
It's a beautiful, chilly Saturday afternoon that I'm spending inside. I've been overtaken by that strange kind of lethargy that afflicts you when you haven't really been doing anything for awhile. The type that lends itself to the horror and neglect of the obvious. When you know there's constructive things you could be doing, but choose to do something non-productive, or as I like to think of it "alternatively productive". After all, becoming culturally literate counts as being productive, right? How else will I be able to make obscure pop culture references if I don't watch obscure pop culture? Right?
Right guys?
In other nerd news, I've been reading this fascinating book Evil In Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy. The author Susan Neiman argues that the modern era in philosophy was primarily concerned with moral, as opposed to epistemological, questions. It grew out of an attempt to defend a theological world-view after the Lisbon earthquake(a horrible disaster in 18th century Portugal). Thousands of people were killed, and quite a few thinkers of the time wondered why God would let such a horrible calamity befall his people. Everyone from Voltaire to Leibniz to Rousseau chimed in with their own reasons.
Neiman defines the modern era in philosophy as one that attempted to discover whether there was any link between natural evil (Natural disasters and the like) and moral evil (The usual stuff we humans do), and whether or not the human mind was even capable of discovering such links. In short, it was about whether or not God's behavior could be rationally understood and defended. She argues a tendentious point that the Enlightenment, as opposed to being an exaltation of human reason, was a radical attempt to rigorously limit and define what the human mind was capable of knowing. So there was an epistemological element, but it was motivated by moral concerns. Morality as Neiman understands it, is our attempt to mediate the gap between what is and what we believe ought to be.
For her the history of philosophy is divided between two types of philosophers. There are those who attempt to make sense of the world's evils, and as such reduce them to the level of half-understood goods. These philosophers have optimistic views about what reason can know and understand. The others are those who maintain the traumatic nature of Evil. For the latter, Evil is an existential violation that frustrates our attempts to make sense of the world. Evil is senseless. That's what makes it so horrible. They can be fairly pessimistic about reason, and the human condition generally. I think you can tell where my sympathies lie in this argument. I geekily sped through this book in two days, so now I'm re-reading a bit slower so that I can get a better sense of what she's going on about.
I'll try to have something a little more upbeat for next time, but evil makes for good reading. Really!