Abstract

For the past thirty-five years or so forgiveness has been of great interest to philosophers, and the recent spate of new books and scholarly essays on the topic is evidence that this interest continues unabated. David Konstan’s Before Forgiveness: The Origins of a Moral Idea is among the recent contributions to this literature. Konstan argues that none of the various ways in which people in the classical Greek and Roman world managed angry emotional states such as resentment constitute the modern phenomenon of forgiveness. And although forgiveness is prominent in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, the main sense of that term refers to God’s forgiveness of human sin, and not to the contemporary notion of human interpersonal forgiveness, which typically refers to a moral transformation of the victim of wrong that involves, centrally, overcoming or forswearing resentment caused by and directed toward a wrongdoer, and doing so for moral reasons. This latter component refers to behaviors enga ..