Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering : What Philosophy Can Tell Us about the Hardest Mystery of All

A reflection on the role of suffering in human existence. It’s right there in the Book of Job: “Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward.” Suffering is an inescapable part of the human condition-which leads to a question that has proved just as inescapable throughout the centuries: Why?Why do we suffer? Why do people die young? Is there any point to our pain, physical or emotional?Do horrors like hurricanes have meaning? In Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering, Scott Samuelson tackles that hardest question of all.To do so, he travels through the history of philosophy and religion, but he also attends closely to the real world we live in.While always taking the question of suffering seriously, Samuelson is just as likely to draw lessons from Bugs Bunny as from Confucius, from his time teaching philosophy to prisoners as from Hannah Arendt’s attempts to come to terms with the Holocaust.He guides us through the arguments people have offered to answer this fundamental ques