Description
University Press of America Challenging the Absolute Nietzsche Heidegger and Europes Struggle Against Fundamentalism 2014 Edition by Simon F. Oliai
Our contemporary world presents a seemingly inexplicable paradox. It is a world where interaction among societies of different cultural traditions has never been easier. A world in which modern technology has visibly overcome the physical barriers that had long condemned the majority of men to relative isolation from one another. Yet, our world is also one in which the illusion of a lost "original" cultural or religious identity, grounded by a metaphysical absolute, pits men against one another. A physically more accessible world has thus become an increasingly fundamentalist one. In this book, written in the wake of such influential European thinkers as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, and Vattimo, Simon Oliai analyzes the conceptual underpinnings of this paradox and argues that, unless the "European" affirmation of man's finite existence becomes universal, we shall never rid ourselves, to echo Nietzsche, of the repressive shadow of a long dead metaphysical idol. Table of contents :- AcknowledgmentsAn Inevitably Endless Introduction Part I: The Use and the Danger of Heidegger for Contemporary ThoughtChapter 1: On the Contemporary Pertinence of Heidegger's Philosophical QuestioningChapter 2: Safeguarding "Being" from Its Fundamentalist Self-PersecutionPart II: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Historical Destiny of "European" ThoughtChapter 3: Nietzsche on the Art of Resistance to Onto-TheologyChapter 4: On "Be-coming European Today"Chapter 5: Heidegger on the Promise of Art at the Twilight of PhilosophyPart III: On "Europe's" Endless Struggle Against "Fundamentalisms"Chapter 6: On Europe's Enlightening ExampleChapter 7: Thinking the Essence of Neo-FundamentalismChapter 8: Only a "God-Artist" Can Save Us: Religion as the "European" Art of Safeguarding the Earth with Others