Annotation
After WW2, one of the main focuses of philosophy has been how to approach the problem of catastrophe. The catastrophes of holocaust and Hiroshima and Nagasaki marked a turning point in philosophy itself.
Facing the disasters of 20th century, even such general, abstract field as philosophy has felt the need to reinvent itself. Philosophical thinking had to be transformed in order to conceptualize catastrophes in an adequate way and not reduce them to mere phenomena of cruel randomness or unexplainable evil.
Thinkers as Günther Anders or Hans Jonas tried immensely to make sense of the nonsense of disaster. Karl Jaspers in his The Atom Bomb and the Future of Man points out that the very concept of future became problematic in the 20th century.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy then presents, in his A Short Treatise on the Metaphysics of Tsunami, one of the most recent attempts to summarize how philosophy has dealt with the idea of disaster, catastrophe and evil in the last decades. Given the present historic context, the concept of catastrophe is once again very pressing.