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Books

Nihilism & Philosophy by Gideon Barker

Roger Caldwell scrutinises philosophical revolutions.

The philosopher as nihilist is a destroyer of worlds, a revolutionary who comes to make us see with new eyes and radically change how we live. The nihilist philosopher uses words, not bombs; but not simply to offer us new doctrines or facts. This is philosophy not as a matter for contemplation, but as something to be lived – and if we are to live in a new order, the old one must first be dismantled or destroyed. The question is, once the cobwebs and lies are swept away, what are we left with? Once all our old values and ways of life are gone, do we still have a world at all, and not chaos?

Typically, however, this going forward into a new world also involves a sort of going back. Gideon Barker’s book Nihilism and Philosophy deals with four such instances.

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