Thomas Brudholm

Hatred as an Attitude

Abstract Although sometimes forgotten in current uses of the term, ‘hatred’ is a notoriously complex and ambiguous phenomenon. Analyzing and identifying what characterizes hatred and articulating a concept that helps us think more clearly about hatred is difficult. It is not even clear whether hatred is an emotion, an attitude, a sentiment or a passion. This essay departs from the idea that perhaps hatred is analyzable as a retributive reactive attitude. More precisely, it presents a philosophical exploration of what happens if one puts a messy bundle of notions and examples of hatred into the more clear conceptual framework offered by Strawson in ‘Freedom and Resentment’. The question whether hatred can be seen as a retributive reactive attitude is examined both with respect to Strawsons division between participant and objective attitudes and with respect to the seemingly most closely related participant attitude, resentment.

Picturing Forgiveness after Atrocity

The article addresses the question when the advocacy of forgiveness in the wake of political mass violence can be harmful and immoral. It engages with this question primarily by probing the value of different pictures of forgiveness, most importantly Rembrandt’s painting Return of the Prodigal Son and a photograph from post-genocide Rwanda. The critical examination of the value of particular pictures in the advocacy of forgiveness also involves attention to particularly problematic ‘pictures’ (in the sense of notions, imaginaries, representations) of the unforgiving victim, of the choices available to societies responding to a violent past, and of unconditional forgiving.

Surveying a Gap: A Philosophical Perspective on Historians’ Responses to Discourses on the ‘Bystanders’

Historians have bemoaned the existence of a gap separating historical study and public interest in the topic of the ‘bystanders’. Moralistic tendencies and emotional excess have been pointed to as part of the explanation of the problem. This article turns the critical perspective back upon the historians and argues that there is more to morality and emotion than is often acknowledged by historians. If this was recognised, the article suggests, it could contribute to a lessening of the tensions sometimes arising when historians meet their public. The article also considers the concept of the ‘bystander’ and the relationship between the disciplines of history and philosophy in relation to the study of the Holocaust.