Analyses the history of Western conceptions of evil, showing it to be remarkably complex, differentiated and contested Charting a sweeping history of evil within the Western philosophical tradition, Gavin Rae shows that the problem of evil--as a conceptual problem--came to the fore with the rise of monotheism. Rae traces the problem of evil from early and Medieval Christian philosophy to modern philosophy, German Idealism, post-structuralism and contemporary analytic philosophy and secularisation.