By Kenneth Maxwell
“Such a Spectacle of Terror and Amazement, as well as the Desolation to Beholders, as perhaps had not been equalled from the Foundation of the World.” Thus an English merchant writing from Lisbon to a friend on November 20, 1755, described the “Late dreadful Earthquake which laid the Capital of Portugal in Ruins…” More recently, philosopher Susan Neiman has called the Lisbon earthquake the first modern disaster. “The sharp distinction between natural and moral evil which now seems self-evident was born around the Lisbon earthquake and nourished by Rousseau.”
But if modern, how is it so? Portugal rarely, if ever, makes it into any general discussion of world history, and much less where “modernity” is concerned. So the debate about the Lisbon earthquake and its impact has become curiously disembodied, philosophical...
[Weiterlesen…]