A Little History of Philosophy (Little Histories)

by Nigel Warburton

In 1755 one of the worst natural disasters of the eighteenth century occurred: the Lisbon earthquake that killed more than 20,000 people. This Portuguese city was devastated not just by the earthquake, but also by the tsunami that followed, and then by fires that raged for days. The suffering and loss of life shook Voltaire's belief in God. He couldn't understand how an event like this could be part of a larger plan. The scale of suffering didn't make any sense to him. Why would a good God allow this to happen? Nor could he see why Lisbon was the target. Why there and not somewhere else? In a key episode in Candide, Voltaire used this real tragedy to help make his case against the optimists. The travellers are shipwrecked near Lisbon in a storm that kills almost everyone else on board their ship. The only one of the crew to survive was a sailor who had apparently deliberately drowned one of their friends. But despite the obvious lack of justice in this, Pangloss still sees everything that happens through the filter of his philosophical optimism. Arriving in Lisbon just after the earthquake has devastated the city and left tens of thousands dead or dying around him, Pangloss continues, absurdly, to maintain that all is well. In the rest of the book things get even worse for Pangloss – he is hanged, dissected alive, beaten and made to row a galley.