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The apparent chasm between two camps in metaphysics, analytic metaphysics and scientific metaphysics, is well recognized. I argue that the relationship between them is not necessarily a rivalry; a division of labour that resembles the relationship between pure mathematics and science is possible. As a case study, I look into the metaphysical underdetermination argument for ontic structural realism, a well‐known position in scientific metaphysics, together with an argument for the position in analytic metaphysics known as ontological nihilism. I argue that we can ascribe the same schema to both arguments, which indicates that analytic metaphysics can offer an abstract model that scientific metaphysics may find useful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The text titled "Mexican Nihilism: A Philosophical Reflection" is a book written by philosopher Mario Teodoro Ramírez. The book is divided into five chapters and addresses topics such as nihilism in Mexican philosophy, the poetics of nihilism in the work of Octavio Paz, the relationship between nihilism and philosophy, the overcoming of Mexican nihilism, and philosophy as the addressee. The author emphasizes the importance of history and philosophy in his analysis and examines the concept of nihilism and its relationship with immanence and transcendence. The book also discusses the overcoming of nihilism through the contributions of Luis Villoro and new realism. The author raises questions about the relationship between nihilism and modernity, the flexibility of the concepts of immanence and transcendence, and the characterization of the Mexican being. Additionally, the importance of including Mexican philosophers in the construction of a transnihilist thought and the need for intercultural dialogue in philosophy are mentioned. The importance of the history of philosophy in Mexico and the need to expand the dialogue between the universal and the particular are also addressed. [Extracted from the article]

The following investigation aims to highlight the reasons why Emmanuel Levinas' philosophy of alterity can be (re)positioned beyond its then-recognized link to phenomenology. It is a question of placing it, paradoxically, on the list of tragic thinking, thanks to its opposition to the romanticism of modern philosophy's Idealism. However, as the focus of the author's reflection is explicitly on the sui generis ethics that springs from the visceral relationship/interpellation arising from the contact/saying of a human Face that cannot be reduced to the Logos, it is urgent to emphasize, on the one hand, a certain approximation of his thought to both the genealogy of morality in Nietesche and the original ontological ethics in Heidegger. On the other hand, the aim is to point out a certain distance between this other nihilism that is consolidated around the ethics of alterity and the thinking of the aforementioned tragic philosophers. After all, the ethics of the Face aims to think differently about the transmutation of values that no longer have as their object the will to power and/or the care of Existence by the human being. Thanks to the radical (alter) action of the human condition brought about by the proximity of the Other-next, a subjectivity emerges in this scenario that is characterized by authentic mothering and a substitution for another. With these observations in mind, we will try to describe the indelible traces of a certain disruptive nihilism present in the genesis of the tragic philosophy of the Face of the Other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nihilism in its classic Nietzschean sense—the ruins of all values—is the general condition of existence of Trumpism. In contrast to Noam Chomsky's argument that Trump, while authoritarian, is not a fascist, this article analyzes Trumpism in relation to nihilism and argues that Trump is a machine of affirmations for the collapse of all values—democracy, equality, justice... caused by the profound alienation of labor in contemporary capitalism. The machinic affirmations produced by the Trump administrative apparatuses—Fox News, Republican National Committee, Newsmax, the Justice Department... —are given a political bond and a spiritual coherence by (a nihilistic) fascism. It is a fascism that replaces the "big words" with equally ground-less affirmations ("Make American Great Again") but, like all fascism, fails to overcome capitalism's devaluation of all values that has in the words of Marx and Engels, "drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Western fear of nothingness can be traced back to Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, three ancient Presocratic thinkers who comprised the first school of Western philosophy: the Milesian School. Despite the varied and ephemeral nature of the world's appearances, the Milesian School suggested that there remains something stable, permanent, and dependable beneath it all. Whether it be Thales' claim that 'all is water,' Anaximander's claim that the universe arises from apeiron, or Anaximenes' claim that 'all is air,' the strategy pursued by these ancient Greek thinkers served to offer comfortable assurance that our cosmos has a steady and knowable foundation. The universe ultimately rests on one 'thing' rather than on nothing at all. In setting this precedent, the Milesian School influenced later Western philosophers whose concerns concentrated on establishing fixed and substantial foundations for the world while also repudiating systems of thought emphasizing the primacy of nothingness. Such systems came to be criticized as 'nihilistic'; a moniker intended to highlight the negativity and meaninglessness of nothingness. This chapter examines the logic of the Milesian thinkers in order to highlight the basic assumption shared by these first philosophers: nothing comes from nothing. This negative view of nothingness may help to account for why it is that the number zero was initially discovered in the East but rejected in the West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Germany of the 1860s and 1870s, the problem of the value of life was urgently debated, as a consequence of the two culture-defining systems of thought that had risen to prominence in those decades—Schopenhauerian Weltschmerz and the theory of evolution—and the degree to which they could be reconciled. On one hand, the struggle for existence affirmed the pessimistic inference as to the suffering and meaninglessness of the cosmos; on the other, it appeared to promise moral and material improvement in human affairs. This article reconstructs the historical connections between the emergence of pessimism and Darwinism, most clearly represented by the work of Eduard von Hartmann, and it argues that Nietzsche's programmatic statements on life, culture, and pessimism, from the Untimely Meditations on, are best understood in light of this context and his engagement with Hartmann's writings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Jim Thompson's posthumous recognition in literature, particularly examining "The Nothing Man" in light of its significance in bridging popular literature and the avant-garde. It delves into Thompson's unique narrative style and thematic elements, portraying flawed protagonists within a dark and nihilistic American landscape, scrutinizing the protagonist's nihilism, self-identity, and suppressed emotions amid a conflicted personal history.

Logical form is thought to be discovered by keeping fixed the logical constants and allowing the non-logical content in the sentence to vary. The problem of logical constants is the problem of defining what counts as a logical constant. In this paper, I will argue that the concept ’logical constant’ is vague. I demonstrate the vagueness of logical constancy by providing a sorites argument, thereby showing the sorites-susceptibility of the concept. Many prior papers in the literature on logical constants hint at this vagueness, but do not explore how theories of vagueness apply to logical constants. In the second half of this paper, I do just this. I consider approaches to logical constants that resemble nihilism about vagueness and more recent theories that relativize truth to precisifications. Finally, I argue that approaches that accept the potential indeterminate status of putative logical constants are preferable to nihilism or relativism about logical constancy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Logos: A Journal, of Religion, Philosophy Comparative Cultural Studies & Art (08687692) is the property of Logos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Joan Robinson provided numerous contributions to economic theory, ranging from her earlier approach to imperfect competition to her participation in the Keynesian revolution, which had a significant influence in the Cambridge heterodox wing, and Post-Keynesianism. But towards the end of her life, her rejection of received theories was great enough to be often interpreted as a form of theoretical nihilism. However, at this stage she also outlined a radical project for a reconstruction of economic theory, drawing on her notion of historical time, while placing distribution at the centre of economic theory. This later project of a reconstruction of economic theory is revisited here, focussing on the various difficulties it faced, and its overall significance and impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Contrastes: Revista Internacional de Filosofia is the property of Contrastes: Revista Internacional de Filosofia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The purpose of this article is to outline the possible relationships between three central approaches of Nietzsche's philosophy: the death of God, reactive nihilism and the will to power; which in turn correspond, in our opinion, with the three transformations of the spirit that the author presents in his Zarathustra (1995, p. 49): The camel, the lion and the child. The above in order to take a look, based on said conceptual constellation, at some aspects of Albert Camus's novel, The Stranger (1966); in particular, to some acts of its protagonist, Meursault, which could be considered ethically questionable. We propose an analysis that, from the mediation between philosophy and literature, allows some reflections on the ethical position of this disturbing character and the way in which Camus's novel is related to a hopeless historical context in which nihilism as indifference takes over. of the spirit and can link it with evil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of effective anti-corruption measures relies on a sound understanding of underlying country-specific cultural patterns of corruption. However, finding these patterns faces the problem of ecological fallacies when tracing back the results of comparative macro-studies to the national level or of using ex-post explanations for cultural variances in experimental research designs. Thus, we ask how cultural patterns can explain country differences in the propensity to act corrupt without neglecting the aforementioned problems. Based on institutional theory, we model path-dependent cultural patterns at the macro, meso and micro levels promoting propensity to act corrupt in Poland and Russia. The results of experimental data gathered from students in Poland and Russia show that the extent to which legal nihilism and ethical dualism are institutionalized at the macro level, as well as the micro factors of gender-specific socialization and studying law, has a significant effect on the propensity to act corrupt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Humanities & Educational Sciences Journal is the property of Humanities & Educational Sciences Journal and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This essay comes from reflections made during the study of the curricular component Religion and Literature at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora, under the guidance of teacher Jimmy Sudário Cabral, the concept of nihilism and its impact on the reformulation of the concept of religion in 19th century Russian literature. The present study is justified by the historical-critical need to recognize how the terms nihilism and religion appear in novels such as "Parents and Children" by Ivan Turgenev, written between 1860 and 1862, although it was already a concept present in Russia in secondary literatures in a period marked by the end of serfdom and the emergence of political movements aimed at defeating the autocratic regime. It is in this work that the Russian writer launches the term nihilist through the protagonist Yevgeni Bazárov, positivist materialist, opponent of the 1840 generation - the idealistic Slavs defenders of romanticism - representing the generation of the 1860s, critique of social values and conventions. The problem in question is to see how the nihilist and religious perspective is situated in the plot. The hypothesis is that the novel researched addresses enough elements to make such an analysis. We worked with the exploratory methodology of interpretative bibliographic character, whose sources are original and qualitative analysis would identify the theses "Nihilism" and "Religion" in the work in question. It is indicated, as a result, to expand the academic debate surrounding this writer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Best practice guidelines have advanced severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) care; however, there is little that currently informs goals of care decisions and processes despite their importance and frequency. Panelists from the Seattle International severe traumatic Brain Injury Consensus Conference (SIBICC) participated in a survey consisting of 24 questions. Questions queried use of prognostic calculators, variability in and responsibility for goals of care decisions, and acceptability of neurological outcomes, as well as putative means of improving decisions that might limit care. A total of 97.6% of the 42 SIBICC panelists completed the survey. Responses to most questions were highly variable. Overall, panelists reported infrequent use of prognostic calculators, and observed variability in patient prognostication and goals of care decisions. They felt that it would be beneficial for physicians to improve consensus on what constitutes an acceptable neurological outcome as well as what chance of achieving that outcome is acceptable. Panelists felt that the public should help to define what constitutes a good outcome and expressed some support for a "nihilism guard." More than 50% of panelists felt that if it was certain to be permanent, a vegetative state or lower severe disability would justify a withdrawal of care decision, whereas 15% felt that upper severe disability justified such a decision. Whether conceptualizing an ideal or existing prognostic calculator to predict death or an unacceptable outcome, on average a 64–69% chance of a poor outcome was felt to justify treatment withdrawal. These results demonstrate important variability in goals of care decision making and a desire to reduce this variability. Our panel of recognized TBI experts opined on the neurological outcomes and chances of those outcomes that might prompt consideration of care withdrawal; however, imprecision of prognostication and existing prognostication tools is a significant impediment to standardizing the approach to care-limiting decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Obsession over power and control has historically been detrimental to the peaceful status quo, often leading to an extreme post-humanistic utopia of immortality. This 'Un-dead' thirst reinstates itself in Hamlet primarily through false consciousness, biased memory, and pluralistic truth. Transhumanist questions of identity, morality, power, and new authority, recall Machiavelli in this Digital Renaissance. This paper explores the modern power dynamics of Shakespearean tragic heroes in a cyborgian utopian context. A society of hybrids garners humanoids that can replace Nietzsche's dead God. Transhumanist interpretations can help with contemporary manifesting themes of immortality, ethical nihilism, reality manipulation, and the historical consequences thereafter - under the backdrops of stagnant power and oversaturated civilizations. An omnipresent tussle between the past and the future for preserving the present, in a way, rejuvenates the old and curtails the newness. The transhumanist space with no human folly is ironic, taking us back to Latour's doubt about modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I'M BECOMING AN N. S. Lyons fan. 'A Prophecy of Evil: Tolkien, Lewis, and Technocratic Nihilism' is the latest installment in The Upheaval, the mysterious author's Substack. (He writes under [...]

The purpose of the article is to study the journalistic materials published in the second half of the XIX – early XX centuries related to the coverage of the women's issue in Russia, to identify on their basis approaches to solving the problems of the formation and development of women's education, to trace trends in their public perception, to compare their positions. Materials on the women's issue and women's education as its most important component, published in the second half of the XIX – early XX centuries. They belong not only to famous public figures, writers, but also to those for whom journalism has become a new experience. The issues of the formation and development of women's education as one of the most important components of the women's issue were widely covered in the journalistic literature of the period under study. It reflected various positions on this issue that have developed in society. The study of literature allowed us to understand more deeply the essence of the public mood of that time, to feel the emotional intensity, to accept the results closer. The analysis of the source material showed that the ranks of the participants of the women's movement and its supporters became increasingly growing and active. Despite the gradual reduction in the number of opponents, their struggle, taking various forms, has been dealing significant blows for many decades, holding back possible successes. A special place in public life was occupied by liberals, whose activities were mainly verbal statements.

Presented with the (non) choice of either assimilating into bourgeois society and, thus, annihilating themselves, or being annihilated by society, the working class subject may choose, neither, engaging, instead, in an act of negative freedom. By engaging in an act of negative freedom, the working class subject destroys all possibility of rehabilitation, thus, determining their fate. The act alone provides a means by which to mark the outer limits of what they are willing to tolerate. Through the act, the subject is altered, their world is changed. Furthermore, before engaging in the act, they do not know what will happen to them. They are, in other words, stepping into the abyss of unknowing. In this article, I will explore the concept of negative freedom in relation to the working class subject: how engaging in such an act marks their fate, separating them from bourgeois society while, also, setting them free. At the same time, due to its inherent withdrawal from civil society, negative freedom veers dangerously near nihilism, thus, reducing their act to one without meaning.

This article aims to analyze how the so-called ‘pedagogy of work’ attempts to answer the challenges of unemployment and job insecurity characterizing the labor market in contemporary society. The authors reflect on the concepts of nihilist pedagogies and the ‘end of work’ by distinguishing two approaches: an active and a passive nihilist pedagogy. The passive approach, based on resignation, is opposed to an active attitude in which labor pedagogy offers tools to address current challenges. The authors support the idea that pedagogy as a human-improving science cannot adopt the position of passive nihilism in interpreting work in contemporary society. To better understand the dynamics related to job insecurity and corrective solutions by pedagogy, the authors analyzed the thoughts of three contemporary philosophers: Zygmunt Bauman, Jeremy Rifkin, and Dominique Méda. These authors redefined the concept of work in connection with the transformations because of globalization, the advent of new communication technologies, and digital work. These changes have redefined not only the concept of work but also the models of work pedagogy in the Western world: capitalism and Marxism. Considering the current challenges, the pedagogy of work needs to be rethought, starting from the problem of employability and focusing on the new occupations in demand in the Internet age. By integrating ideas on interpreting work from the theories of Bauman, Rifkin, and Méda, it is possible to propose a pedagogy of work in the age of change and to outline possible values of education inspired by it.

While the problem of nihilism is derived from a particular historical and intellectual context in Western philosophy, i.e., the pantheism controversy in modern German philosophy and the ideas of Nietzsche, non-Western thinkers also engaged with it and developed responses to it. In this article, I am interested in analyzing Muhammad Iqbal’s (1877–1938), a leading Muslim thinker (a Sufi) from India, engagement with the problem of nihilism and his response to it from a Sufi perspective. Arguing that the existing literature on Iqbal fails to understand the deeper impact of Nietzsche’s ideas on Iqbal’s philosophy and the dramatic role “the problem of nihilism” played in causing changes in Iqbal’s philosophy, or on Iqbal’s intellectual development, in this article, I analyze how Iqbal’s encounter with the ideas of Nietzsche during his study period in Europe between 1905 and 1908 has introduced him to the problem of nihilism in its Nietzschean form, how this led Iqbal to a nihilistic mood/crisis from 1909 to 1913, and then how he later developed a response to nihilism by reconstructing the Sufi cosmology and by revaluating the Sufi values of the pantheistic/Persian type of Sufism – the outcome of which is found in his philosophical poem Asrar-i-Khudî (1915).

In Graham Harman’s realist philosophy, which I call “ontological liberalism,” all objects are considered equal, there being no unbridgeable gap between various modes of being. Every object is a unique individual, endowed with a positive being. Any privileging of a certain class of objects over other classes of objects is invalidated. An object is composed of its relations, summarized under the heading of what Harman calls “sensual qualities,” while objects also contain mutually inaccessible essences. Supposedly, every object may be characterized by the duality of relationality and substantiality. According to ontological liberalism, all objects exist. In this essay, I propose an ontological nihilist critique of Harman’s liberal ontology. We cannot exclude the possibility of every object being equally nonexistent. Appearances could pertain all the way down, with no final substance at the end of the infinite chain of appearances. Building on insights gleaned from Jan Westerhoff’s defence of ontological nihilism, I propose a nihilist reconfiguration of Harman’s ontological liberalism. If objects and relations are empty and reality is made of appearances all the way down, no underlying objective essence can or should be posited. Because relations are without basis, lacking in substance, nothing exists, nothing happens, and no objects exist.

This article asks what an adequate philosophical response to the certainty of heat death would be: the moment in the timeline of the universe when all possible energy transformations have been actualized and life, thought, and action cease to be possible. Through a reading of Hans Jonas’s existential work on Gnosticism, the article begins by defining what is meant by the notions cosmotheoretical and cosmoethical as well as offering a description of what Jonas calls “cosmic nihilism.” After this, the article looks at two extreme philosophical responses to heat death. The first response examined is by Friedrich Nietzsche, whose eternal return is shown to be a reactive philosophical response to the linear entropic finitude that heat death implies. The second response is by Ray Brassier. Different from Nietzsche, Brassier is shown to affirm the extinction that heat death promises. However, his insistence that heat death partakes of the transcendental and the real, but not the ideal, is demonstrated to be amphibolous. In the final part of the article, I offer what could be called a thermodynamic architectonic response to the heat death of the universe, arguing that heat death should be understood as a guiding transcendental Idea in the Kantian sense of the term.

The article analyzes the ideology of the Sixties – members of the Russian revolutionary community of the late 1850s – 1860s. A revolutionary community means a set of ideologically close personalities and associations with revolutionary views; it makes possible to examine members of the revolutionary underground and people sympathizing with revolutionary views as one community. Due to the fact that definitions of the Sixties as revolutionary democrats, Narodniks, nihilists, etc. are common in historiography, the article proposes to look at their ideology as a non-hierarchical, eclectic combination of different views, concepts and ideas, among which there were no main ideas. The author of the article identifies six main elements of the ideology of the Sixties: the denial of the old regime (which presupposed anti-conservative views, as well as the prevalence of the nihilism subculture), socialist orientation (from the strict theory of “Russian socialism” to abstract sympathies for the very idea of socialism), “craving for the people” (which foreshadowed the ideology of revolutionary Narodnichestvo of the 1870s), democratic ideals (which mainly assumed egalitarianism, the idea of equality of all members of society, which resulted in interest and support for the women’s movement, the creation of communes for living together and everyday life), enlightenment (expressed in the cult of science and knowledge, educational work among the intelligentsia), faith in the proximity of the revolution (a specific feature of the Sixties, which manifested itself in anticipation of an imminent mass popular uprising). The research is based on a complex of various sources (memoirs, journalism, investigative testimony), according to which it is possible to identify the views of both well-known publicists of democratic magazines and the emigrant press, as well as members of underground revolutionary circles.

The issue of how we understand nature and operate with it goes beyond the scope of ecology or economics and directly affects the ontological-anthropological foundations of culture. The subject-object model that dominates today claims universal validity, but many thinkers challenge its universality. Representatives of the European continental conservative thought of the 20th - early 21st centuries focus on the already accepted forms of natural knowledge and nature relations, which do not imply the objectification of nature or its reduction to an economic resource. These cultural forms belong to the historical past, which raises the question of the possible return to them by the contemporary man or of their possible return to his life. The article starts with the analysis of the nature-knowledge that dominated, according to the mentioned conservative thinkers, before the modern ‘objectification’ of nature. The author considers two related but non-identical approaches to the ‘traditional’ understanding of nature developed by these thinkers. The first approach claims the ‘sanctification of nature’, i.e., the natural world is not objectified but understood as a single reality that includes the man and has a sacred status. The second approach is represented by the metaphysically oriented conservatists and considers the natural world primarily through its function of symbolizing the transcendent supernatural world. Then the author considers the conservative thinkers’ views on the ‘nihilism’ of the last centuries, which led to the current subjectobject relationship with nature, and focuses on their perception of the Christian understanding of nature. The article concludes with the hypothesis that the recognition of each culture’s ‘right to its own nature’ (the essence of the contemporary cultural pluralism) can help to overcome the universalization of a specific understanding of nature by choosing a different model known to this culture in past epochs.

The article analyzes the perspectives of overcoming nihilism (Verwindung) by discussing Heidegger’s relationship with East Asian traditions of thought (first of all, chan/zen and daoism). We can consider the emergence of Enframing (Gestell or Ge-stell) of the essence of modern technology defined by the philosopher as a diagnosis of the fulfillment of nihilism and the end of the Western tradition of thought. By revealing the problem of the end of the Western metaphysical tradition and its overcoming, the aim is to understand the possibilities of the emergence of a different way of thinking by looking at the horizon of post-metaphysical thinking. Heidegger’s dialogue with the sources of Eastern thought is a search for perspectives on overcoming nihilism (Verwindung), which is inseparable from the deepening of self, other and mutual understanding.

In this article the author attempts to show that a new interpretation of the Easter mystery of the three days can allow us to review the link between the I and the you, and between the I and him, within the disorienting dynamics of postmodernity. In addition to the first and second pronoun, in fact, there is a third pronoun that finally awaits a rendez-vous between the disenchantment of Saturday and the light of Sunday. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“The Useful Passion: Death and the Meaning of Life in Miguel de Unamuno”. The bourgeois attitude towards death is to postpone it and forget it. The meaning of our existence is, then, to lengthen life as much as possible. Heidegger understands death as the most authentic possibility of human beings: human beings are there to die. In Unamuno the desire to live of the hunger for immortality is grounded on the awareness of having to die; at the same time, having to die implies the hunger for immortality. This is the tragic sense of life. Absolute death implies the complete lack of sense. Thus, human beings would be a useless passion. In the hunger for immortality there is, therefore, a profound affirmation of the meaning of life as a struggle for meaning. Although nothingness awaits us, let’s turn this into an injustice: that is, act in such a way that you do not deserve to die, that you deserve eternity and meaning. Against the metaphysical nihilism of Mephistopheles, hope is thus grounded. Therefore, this passion is useful since we are only able to relate to eternity and meaning by deserving them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to analyze the nihilistic reinterpretation of the Christian heritage in the light of Gianni Vattimo's thought. We seek to identify the link between secularization in postmodernity, religion, and nihilism, as well as to situate the pensiero debole of the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo as a nihilistic posture of hermeneutic ontology. The question we want to answer is how can the nihilistic reinterpretation of the Christian heritage contribute to the formation of Western Culture? The methodology used is a hermeneutic analysis of the works of Gianni Vattimo. As a result, we hope to highlight the role of secularization, which for the Vattimo is an inner process of Christianity. Vattimo proposes that secularization be seen as a mechanism for unveiling the natural sacred based on Kenosis. Secularization is the effective realization of Christianity as a non-sacrificial religion, and it would lead us to an ethic of non-violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary critically examines two facets of Tracy Llanera's recent book Richard Rorty: Outgrowing Modern Nihilism. First, it considers her interpretation of Richard Rorty's redemptive project. It argues that, while Llanera succeeds in resolving tensions in Rorty's public‐private distinction, her account downplays the role of abnormal discourse within projects of self‐creation. Second, it raises several questions about Llanera's strategy for situating this redemptive project within debates concerning existential nihilism. On her view, one ought to follow Rorty in addressing the problem of egotism instead of the problem of nihilism, since the former is prior to the latter. But it is not clear who counts as an egotist, or why egotists are especially prone to becoming nihilists. Moreover, there are reasons to think that egotism and nihilism are fundamentally different kinds of problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is a reply to commentaries by Elin Danielsen Huckerby, Yvonne Huetter‐Almerigi, and Paul Showler on Tracy Llanera's Richard Rorty: Outgrowing Modern Nihilism (2020). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a semantic reading of Tracy Llanera's brilliant book Richard Rorty: Outgrowing Modern Nihilism. Llanera is reframing the debate of how to react to the malaise of modern nihilism by proposing a change of metaphor: instead of trying to "overcome" nihilism, we should try to "outgrow" nihilism. This article invites Llanera to shed more light on her project with respect to the semantic categories of realism and representationalism, and with respect to the growing field of conceptual engineering. Can Llanera's project be fruitfully understood as engineering the concepts of "transcendence" and "redemption"? How much of the project hangs on the idea that language does not represent but is rather a tool that helps us fulfill our varying needs? How neat is the entanglement of semantic and existential meaning? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Richard Rorty: Outgrowing Modern Nihilism, Tracy Llanera places Richard Rorty in conversation with philosophers confronting nihilism as a "malaise of modernity." She shows how Rortyan thought offers a horizontal and relational approach to "redemption," as opposed to religious or philosophical paths to be saved by higher beings or ideas. This essay focuses on Llanera's redescription of Rorty and whether amplifying Rorty's use of "redemption" and "transcendence" is wise. Leaving behind this laden vocabulary might better serve Llanera's purpose of illuminating a path to outgrow, rather than overcome, the anxiety of nihilism. After exploring Llanera's redescription of Rorty, the essay suggests that a different vocabulary—composed of words such as ease, hope, and comfort, and potentially as capable of supporting Llanera's overarching aim—is available in Rorty's writings. Turning to this other vocabulary might strengthen Llanera's significant contribution to the nihilism debate and to Rortyan and pragmatist philosophy more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an obvious premier degré contradiction in commemorating Dada centenaries. The movement was famously against permanence and yet Dada has become enshrined in popular culture, exhibitions, catalogues, and indeed academic research. To paraphrase a Dada slogan, perhaps the true Dada researcher should be against research into Dada. But let us not be too fetishistic or precious about Dada. To borrow from Delia Ungureanu's magisterial comparative study of surrealism, where is Dada in the 21st-century, and what does it mean to understand that question not so much in terms of conscious practice (such as contemporary performance art) but in relation to the pan-human, pan-historical phenomena cherished by Dadaists and which can be forgotten in the rush to eulogise Dada nihilism, such as ethics and peace, radical humanism, socio-political engagement, and the question of how to live well with oneself and with others? The world is on fire, and Dada is both dead and all around us. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The book "Professor of Apocalypse. The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes" written by Jerry Z. Muller is a meticulous biography of Professor Jacob Taubes, a prominent professor specializing in apocalypse, messianism, Gnosticism, and nihilism. Although he was not considered a "great thinker," his ideas developed outside the academic sphere. The book also explores his relationship with Carl Schmitt and his anti-capitalist stance. The author faced difficulties in researching his work due to the oral nature of his thinking and writing. The review highlights the importance of Taubes' conversations with figures such as Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb, as well as his relationship with Gershom Scholem. Important places in his life, such as Vienna, Berlin, Jerusalem, and Paris, are also mentioned. The review concludes by emphasizing the fascination that Taubes generated and the importance of interpreting his work. [Extracted from the article]

Fichte assigns 'intellectual intuition' a new meaning after Kant. But in 1799, his doctrine of intellectual intuition is publicly deemed indefensible by Kant and nihilistic by Jacobi. I propose to defend Fichte's doctrine against these charges, leaving aside whether it captures what he calls the 'spirit' of transcendental idealism. I do so by articulating three problems that motivate Fichte's redirection of intellectual intuition from being to acting: (1) the regress problem, which states that reflecting on empirical facts of consciousness leads only to further facts and so cannot yield a first principle; (2) the rhapsody problem, which states that the categories form a haphazard set and so lack necessity unless they derive from a first principle; and (3) the nihilism problem, which states that a first principle cannot lie outside our cognition of it, lest it be the cause of our cognition and, being first, the cause of all our actions, reducing us to machines. Crucially, Fichte's three motivating problems are in fact aspects of a single problem. Leaving any aspect unsolved spoils putative solutions to the other two. Consequently, Fichte requires a single unified solution to all three, which his doctrine of intellectual intuition provides. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the concept of nihilism. From so many understandings, we seek to present the process of the weakening of absolute truths that result in new possibilities of experiencing religion, especially Christianity. Based on bibliographical research on Gianni Vattimo's works, other contemporary authors have been dialogued to understand the eventuality process of being and the dissolution of values and metaphysical truths that sustain certain philosophical and religious fundamentalismo and dogmatism. For this, it is important to appreciate the hermeneutics role in this opening process to plurality and language as a guarantee for life meaning and existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares two anti-modern readings of Plato and the Platonic tradition, both complementary and opposite, that of Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) and that of Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907). These appropriations, which respectively open and closes the nineteenth century, express the rise and decline of the "romantic Platonism." De Maistre quotes, comments on, translates and rewrites Plato's dialogues, as well as various texts from the ancient Neoplatonism and the modern Platonic tradition. On the other hand, Huysmans's texts, particularly À rebours (1884), the most representative novel of decadent aesthetics, express the crisis of romantic Platonism, as shown by its nihilism, the figure of the simulacrum and the modification of the androgynous topic. Thus, Platonism and its crisis explore historical temporality, from revolutionary acceleration to fin-de-siècle decadence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Danish Muslims who have returned from jihad in Syria describe the Arab Spring as a miracle—a divine intervention that called upon them to radically change their lives. From one day to the next, they turned towards God and decided to travel to the Middle East to take up arms. According to the interlocutors, the miracle of the Arab Spring made them wake up to find themselves as part of the Muslim umma—the community of the last prophet Mohammed—that is, the prophet of the time of the end—but also to find that maybe the end of time had arrived and that they could choose to join the Great Battle between infidels and believers. Based on long-term fieldwork, this article investigates my interlocutors' practices of struggling in the way of Allah. Arguing against Olivier Roy's central thesis that European jihadists are violent nihilists, I contend that we need to reinstate God and the relation between divine determination and my interlocutors' agency to explain why jihadists act as they do. To understand this relation, I draw on anthropological studies of Islam and Christianity, as well as Agamben's distinction between "the time of the end" (messianism) and "the end of time" (apocalypse). My interlocutors believe that they live in End-times: they know that the world is about to end but they do not know when, and I suggest that it is exactly this gap that their jihadists' practices strive to bridge. Struggling to bring about what they believe is already God-given, I argue that jihadists are optimists, not nihilists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This excerpt from my dissertation outlines and explains what I have coined "pluralistic juridical nihilism. " I posit that the history of jurisprudence is largely fraudulent. The concept of "law" is not a fixed idea. Rather, law is a word that represents several concepts that change depending on the context in which it is used. To some degree, this essay supports the work of Dr. Glanville Williams on the subject but expands thereon by showing my own internal "pluralism"--several theories of jurisprudence may coexist at the exact same time without any conflict whatsoever. Ultimately, law is a word that evokes both sadness and joy. Importantly to me (and why I decided to write this essay), the word brings up the sadness and anger Ifelt when apolice officer took afamily member 's life. It brings up the shock I felt when anotherfamily member was taunted by a state court judge at a preliminary hearing. It reminds me of the joy I felt when I sued prisons and won injunctions to protect vulnerable individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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