Nihilism and Philosophy: Nothingness, Truth and World (Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy)

"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."--Bloomsbury Publishing. Cover 1 Half Title 2 Title 4 Copyright 5 Dedication 6 Epigraph 7 Contents 8 Acknowledgements 10 Introduction 12 Truth and world 14 Truth and wisdom 17 Socratic truth 22 Truth and time 26 1 The True World 34 The two worlds 34 Whence worldlessness? 40 The Christian world 50 Spinoza’s world 62 2 Cynic Nihilism 72 Phusis 77 Foucault’s Cynics 80 Apolis 84 Negation 94 3 Paul’s World 104 A genealogy of cosmos 106 Paul against empire 116 Anti-cosmos 120 Badiou’s anti-cosmos 128 4 Paul: Nihilist or Overman? 134 The reactive Paul 139 The active Paul 141 Paul the Overman 143 The messianic vocation 149 5 Nietzsche’s World 154 Nietzsche’s anti-cosmos 155 The true world is a lie 159 ‘The world is perfect’4 163 Heidegger’s Nietzsche 168 6 Heidegger’s World 176 Being-in-the-world 177 Freedom and finitude 184 The Nothing 188 Nihilism 191 7 Parrhesia 202 Parrhesia in the polis 206 Philia 210 Socrates’s last words 213 Philaletheia 216 Conclusion 226 References 232 Index 240