The Epistemology Of Desire And The Problem Of Nihilism

Author : Allan Hazlett
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0198889852
Total Pages : 193 pages
Book Rating : 4.54/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Epistemology of Desire and the Problem of Nihilism written by Allan Hazlett and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-04-25 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most people have wondered whether anything really matters, some have temporarily thought that nothing really matters, and some philosophers have defended the view that nothing really matters. However, if someone thinks that nothing matters--if they are a "nihilist about value"--then it seems that it is irrational for them to care about anything. It seems that nihilism about value mandates total indifference. This is the "problem of nihilism" Allan Hazlett addresses in The Epistemology of Desire and the Problem of Nihilism. Hazlett argues that the problem of nihilism arises because desire--and thus caring--is a species of evaluation that admits of irrationality. This contradicts the influential Humean view that desire does not admit of irrationality, which has a ready solution to the problem of nihilism: since desire does not admit of irrationality, it cannot be irrational to care about something that you believe does not matter. However, following G.E. Anscombe, Hazlett argues that desire has the same relationship to goodness as belief has to truth: just as truth is the accuracy condition for belief, goodness is the accuracy condition for desire. This reveals desire as an appropriate target of epistemological inquiry, in the same way that belief is an appropriate target of epistemological inquiry. Desires can amount to knowledge (in the same way that beliefs can amount to knowledge) and, crucially for the problem of nihilism, desire admits of irrationality (in the same way that belief admits of irrationality). Nevertheless, although it is obviously irrational to believe something that you believe is not true, Hazlett argues that it is not irrational to desire something you believe is not good, despite the fact that goodness is the accuracy condition for desire. This provides a solution to the problem of nihilism, and shows that nihilism about value can coherently be combined with the anti-Humean view that desire is a species of evaluation.

Author : Nolen Gertz
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262537176
Total Pages : 226 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Nihilism written by Nolen Gertz and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the meaning of meaninglessness: why it matters that nothing matters. When someone is labeled a nihilist, it's not usually meant as a compliment. Most of us associate nihilism with destructiveness and violence. Nihilism means, literally, “an ideology of nothing. “ Is nihilism, then, believing in nothing? Or is it the belief that life is nothing? Or the belief that the beliefs we have amount to nothing? If we can learn to recognize the many varieties of nihilism, Nolen Gertz writes, then we can learn to distinguish what is meaningful from what is meaningless. In this addition to the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Gertz traces the history of nihilism in Western philosophy from Socrates through Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre. Although the term “nihilism” was first used by Friedrich Jacobi to criticize the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Gertz shows that the concept can illuminate the thinking of Socrates, Descartes, and others. It is Nietzsche, however, who is most associated with nihilism, and Gertz focuses on Nietzsche's thought. Gertz goes on to consider what is not nihilism—pessimism, cynicism, and apathy—and why; he explores theories of nihilism, including those associated with Existentialism and Postmodernism; he considers nihilism as a way of understanding aspects of everyday life, calling on Adorno, Arendt, Marx, and prestige television, among other sources; and he reflects on the future of nihilism. We need to understand nihilism not only from an individual perspective, Gertz tells us, but also from a political one.

Author : Tom Darby
Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN 13 : 0773573569
Total Pages : 216 pages
Book Rating : 4.67/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Nietzsche and the Rhetoric of Nihilism written by Tom Darby and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 1989-07-15 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New readings and perspectives on Nietzsche's work are brought together in this collection of essays by prominent scholars from North America and Europe. They question whether Nietzsche's work and the conventional interpretation of it is rhetorical and nihilistic.

Author : Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 468 pages
Book Rating : 4.93/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Will to Power written by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche and published by . This book was released on 1910 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Gideon Baker
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350035173
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.71/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Nihilism and Philosophy written by Gideon Baker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The question of nihilism is always a question of truth. It is a crisis of truth that causes the experience of the nothingness of existence. What elevated truth to this existential position? The answer is: philosophy. The philosophical will to truth opens the door to nihilism, since it both makes identifying truth the utmost aim and yet continually calls it into question. Baker develops the central insight that the crises of truth and of existence, or 'loss of world', that occur within nihilistic thought are inseparable, in a wide-ranging study from antiquity to the present, from ancient Cynics, St Paul, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Agamben, and Badiou. Baker contends that since nihilism is always a question of the relation to the world occasioned by the philosophical will to truth, an answer to nihilism must be able to propose a new understanding of truth.

Author : James theodore Stillwell III
Publisher : Lulu.com
ISBN 13 : 1387332058
Total Pages : 194 pages
Book Rating : 4.52/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Power Nihilism: A Case for Moral & Political Nihilism written by James theodore Stillwell III and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2017-11-11 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Within this text James Theodore Stillwell III extracts thought strands from profound thinkers such as Hume, Nietzsche, Kant A.J. Ayer, C.L. Stevenson, J. L. Mackie, Ragnar RedBeard, Peter Sjöstedt-H and interweaves them into a meta ethical tapestry that is a liberating-brutally honest red pill. Mixing non cognitivism, error theory, with projectivism, Stillwell puts forth a kind of moral nihilism (Power-Nihilism) that dispenses with both secular and theistic forms of moral realism. In the final chapter James articulates his qualified form of political nihilism and critiques such concepts as ""Natural law"" and ""Natural Rights"" along with a few other pivotal concepts within political theory. This book also covers such topics as the will to power, slave morality, bad conscience, the on going destruction of Western civilization, radical individualism, collectivism, egalitarianism, hierarchy and much more...

Author : Allan Hazlett
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199674809
Total Pages : 317 pages
Book Rating : 4.00/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book A Luxury of the Understanding written by Allan Hazlett and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-09 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Allan Hazlett challenges the philosophical assumption of the value of true belief. He critiques the view that true belief is better for us than false belief, and the view that truth is "the aim of belief". An alternative picture is provided, on which the fact that some people love truth is all there is to "the value of true belief".

Author : Conor Cunningham
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1134474008
Total Pages : 342 pages
Book Rating : 4.04/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Genealogy of Nihilism written by Conor Cunningham and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-06-29 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text re-reads Western history in the light of nihilistic logic, which pervades two millennia of Western thought. From Parmenides to Alain Badiou, via Plotinus, Avicenna, Duns Scotus, Ockham, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre, Lacan, Deleuze and Derrida, a genealogy of nothingness can be witnessed in development, with devastating consequences for the way we live.

Author : Kenneth Baynes
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 9780262521130
Total Pages : 504 pages
Book Rating : 4.3X/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book After Philosophy written by Kenneth Baynes and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After Philosophy provides an excellent framework for understanding the most important strains of current philosophical work in North America, England, France, and Germany. The selections from the work of fourteen contemporary philosophers not only display the multiplicity of approaches being pursued since the breakup of any consensus on what philosophy is, but also help to clarify this proliferation of views and to spell out today's basic options for doing, or not doing, philosophy today. With a general introduction delineating what is in dispute between the different parties to the end-of-philosophy debates, brief introductions to the thought of each author, and suggestions for further reading following each selection, After Philosophy is ideally suited for use in any course that includes an overview of the bewildering variety of contemporary approaches to philosophy.The major sections and contributors are: I. The End of Philosophy. Richard Rorty Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida. II. The Transformation of Philosophy: Systematic Proposals. Donald Davidson, Michael Dummett, Hilary Putnam, Karl-Otto Apel, Jürgen Habermas. III. The Transformation of Philosophy: Hermeneutics, Narrative, Rhetoric. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, Alasdair Maclntyre, Hans Blumenberg, Charles Taylor.Kenneth Baynes is currently doing postgraduate research at the University of Frankfurt. James Bohman lectures in philosophy at Boston University, and Thomas McCarthy is a professor of philosophy at Northwestern University and the editor of the MIT Press series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought.

Author : John Marmysz
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
ISBN 13 : 1474424589
Total Pages : 314 pages
Book Rating : 4.85/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Cinematic Nihilism written by John Marmysz and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-31 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through case studies of popular films, including Prometheus, The Dark Knight Rises, Dawn of the Dead and The Human Centipede , this book re-emphasises the constructive potential of cinematic nihilism.