What philosophy can and cannot say about evil

With few exceptions, academic philosophers have had little to say about the Holocaust. There was a time when I considered this outrageous. How could a discipline that examines human values and aspirations ignore one of the most significant, if not the most significant, events of the century? We are rightly disdainful of the scientists and professors in Germany who continued their studies amid some of the most fiendish evil ever imagined. How can we criticize them if the present philosophical community sees nothing in the Holocaust worth discussing? Unless we entertain the dubious proposition that philosophy has nothing to do with the historical circumstances in which it is written, we must ask how the events in Germany force a reexamination of philosophical categories.