The Faces of Contemporary Phenomenology gathers thirteen studies that explore evil in its lived form, rather than merely its definition. Building on Tischner's account of evil as a relational “apparition,” Sartre's concepts of freedom and bad faith, Camus's absurdity and rebellion, Lévinas’s ethics of the face, and Arendt's banality of evil, the introductory study argues that thinking itself—however fallible it may be—remains our chief safeguard against thoughtless participation in wrongdoing.
The collected essays extend these insights across three sections: contemporary philosophical readings of Ricoeur, Girard, and Marion, alongside an account of dialogical evil as a rupture of the I—Thou relationship; phenomenological encounters with literature, from Faulkner to Camus's Caligula; and practical studies of evil and violence in politics, law, medicine, and embodied suffering, including a Foucauldian critique of clinical power and an interpretation of evil as ressentiment. Together, they examine how evil manifests itself, resists rational mastery, and implicates freedom, guilt, and responsibility.