Susan Neiman

(USA, 1955) is a philosopher, commentator, essaysist and director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam. She combines old ideals of freedom, equality and brotherhood with cynical realism: "Idealism for grownups," as she calls it. In 2014 she won the Spinoza Lens, a biannual Dutch prize for an "internationally renowned thinker on ethics and society." Neiman, a Jewish-American, became known with Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy. In Why Should You Grow Up? (2015), she uses the work of famous philosophers like Kant, Rousseau and De Beauvoir to show that ideals need not be lost to the passing years, and are especially needed, for example, to counteract the kind of evil embraced by IS youth. "It is precisely our society's materialism that drives young people into the clutches of radical ideology." She holds politicians responsible for no longer daring to promote their own Enlightenment-inspired European culture.