Ignacio L. Moya Edits Book about Modern Philosophy and Evil

Ignacio L. Moya (Sheridan College), along with co-editors Corey W. Dyck and Fabio Malfara (both Western University), has published Evil, Suffering, and Pessimism: Readings from the Darker Side of Modern Philosophy (2026, Broadview Press). The anthology confronts some of the most unsettling questions in human thought: why evil exists, whether human beings are the architects of their own suffering, and whether life itself may be more painful than pleasurable.

The volume introduces students and general readers to a less familiar history of philosophy, showing that questions about evil and suffering have not been afterthoughts in modern European philosophy but central concerns. Drawing on seventeenth- to nineteenth-century debates, the collection places canonical figures such as G. W. Leibniz, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche alongside voices often omitted from the traditional canon, including Ottobah Cugoano, Mary Astell, Olga Plümacher, and Eduard von Hartmann. In doing so, the anthology demonstrates how questions about the value of life preoccupied philosophers throughout the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.