Drew M. Dalton, "The Matter of Evil: From Speculative Realism to Ethical Pessimism" (Northwestern UP, 2024)

Most of us today would assume that morality and ethics, being value propositions, are questions for inspired leaders, religious creeds, poets—in other words, for the humanities. But what if I told you that we can construct a system of ethics and morality by studying math—more specifically: the laws of thermodynamics? That’s what Professor Drew M Dalton argues in his latest book. Dalton traces a line of metaphysical inquiry from Kant through Spinoza, Nietzsche, and others up to today to show how we get from E=mc2 to a full-throated call to resist evil and alleviate suffering to our very last breath. By overturning our assumptions about the nature and value of reality, The Matter of Evil: From Speculative Realism to Ethical Pessimism (Northwestern UP, 2024) presents a provocative new model of ethical responsibility that is both logically justifiable and scientifically sound. Dalton argues for “ethical pessimism,” a position previously marginalized in the West, as a means to cultivate an account of ethical responsibility and political activism that takes seriously the unbecoming of being and the moral horror of existence. Drew M. Dalton is a professor of English at Indiana University, having received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Leuven in Belgium. His research focuses on the normative implications of different metaphysical systems and, specifically, he’s interested in how questions of right and wrong, good and evil, beauty and pleasure are framed within aesthetics, literary theory, ethics, and political philosophy. He is the author of Longing for the Other: Levinas and Metaphysical Desire (Duquesne University Press, 2009), The Ethics of Resistance: Tyranny of the Absolute (Bloomsbury, 2018), and The Matter of Evil: From Speculative Realism to Ethical Pessimism (Northwestern University Press, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

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Lila Corwin Berman, "Who Is American? Belonging and the Question of Jewish Citizenship" (Princeton UP, 2026)

The history of Jews in the United States is often told as if they immigrated, gained citizenship, and almost immediately achieved full legal rights. Yet this story fundamentally misses how citizensh...

6 Heinä 1h 3min

Katherine Krauss, "Exemplarity and Allusion in Macrobius' Saturnalia" (Oxford UP, 2026)

Exemplarity and Allusion in Macrobius' Saturnalia (Oxford UP, 2026) offers a new framework for interpreting interactions with classical source material in Macrobius’ Saturnalia. It argues that the Sat...

6 Heinä 1h 8min

Ted Powell, "Churchill and the Crown" (Oxford UP, 2026)

Winston Churchill was born in a palace and was given a funeral worthy of a king. His family had enjoyed an intimate association with the British monarchy stretching back centuries. As King Edward VI...

6 Heinä 38min

Lauren Duval, "The Home Front: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupation, and the Making of American Independence" (UNC Press, 2025)

What was it like to live in a city experiencing occupation by a foreign army? What did it mean when a family had to quarter an officer in their home? More specifically, how did military occupation aff...

6 Heinä 45min

Meditation Sickness and the Dangers of Buddhist Practice with Pierce Salguero

Pierce Salguero joins us to discuss his new co-edited volume, Meditation Sickness: A Sourcebook on the Dangers of Buddhist Practice. While modern mindfulness frames meditation purely as a wellness too...

6 Heinä 1h 25min

Alexandre Frenette, "Blame the Intern: On (Not) Breaking Into the Creative Economy" (Princeton UP, 2026)

Who gets to be a creative worker? In Blame the Intern: On (Not) Breaking Into the Creative Economy, (Princeton University Press, 2026) Alexandre Frenette, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Vande...

6 Heinä 43min

Stephen Robertson, "Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935" (Stanford UP, 2024)

The violence that spread across Harlem on the night of March 19, 1935 was the first large-scale racial disorder in the United States in more than a decade and the first occurrence in the nation’s lea...

6 Heinä 57min

Mixed-Sex Dancing and Jewish Modernity

Dances and balls appear throughout world literature as venues for young people to meet, flirt, and form relationships, as any reader of Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, or Romeo and Juliet can atte...

6 Heinä 0s