What Murderers Make Philosophers Think About
On ‘Serial Killing: A Philosophical Anthology’
Have You Thought About Evil Today?
Recently I wrote about the question of evil.
It may not surprise you, then, that I also picked up Serial Killing: A Philosophical Anthology (2015), edited by Edia Connole and Gary J. Shipley. This is a collection of postmodern essays about the meaning (or non-meaning) of Life, the Universe, and Everything, centering on what some philosophers think about when they think about serial killers.
I don’t mean that they think like serial killers, mind you, at least not out on the street. And in the headline “What Murderers Make Philosophers Think About,” I don’t mean that murderers put philosophers in a dungeon and forced them to think, but rather that philosophers all on their own generate thoughts about murderers.
The book is about how serial killers have been portrayed, what serial killers say about themselves, and the lessons we — or, at least, some postmodern philosophers — can draw from those phenomena and discourses.
