The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-modern Culture - Tapa dura

"Sharp and deceptively simple essays." -- Brian Rotman, Times Literary Supplement

In this book the author intervenes in current debates concerning the characteristics of modernity and post-modernity. He focuses on the work of Nietzsche and Heidegger and shows how their bitter criticisms of modern European thought prepared the way for more recent proclamations of the end of the modern era. Against this backcloth, it pursues a range of questions which are central to aesthetics and hermeneutic philosophy. He sides with contemporary philosophers such as Gadamer and Rorty in rejecting the search for stable and transcendent foundations for knowledge. But he adds a new dimension to current debates by introducing the notion of "weak thought" and "weak ontology". These notions, which have been much debated in Italy, offer a way of going beyond metaphysics by curing philosophy of the modernist disease - the search for foundations - and by resituating questions of truth and being within the realm of human experience. This book should interest students of philosophy, sociology, literature and cultural studies, 2nd and 3rd year students at universities and colleges and all interested in the "post-modernity" debate.