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"Nihilism."
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Could there have been nothing? : against metaphysical nihilism
\"Could there have been nothing? is the first book-length study of metaphysical nihilism - the claim that there could have been no concrete objects. It critically analyses the debate around nihilism and related questions about the metaphysics of possible worlds, concrete objects and ontological dependence\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The War on Useless Literature: Nihilism and the Crisis of Modern Hebrew Literature in Russia
This article details how the ideas of nihilism challenged the incipient sphere of Hebrew literature in nineteenth-century Russia. In the 1860s, Russian nihilist critics Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Nikolai Dobroliubov, and Dmitrii Pisarev argued that the value of literary works lies in their social utility. For young Jewish writers emerging from rabbinic milieus where the engagement with sacred texts was valued for its own sake, discovery of the utilitarian view of literature threatened to undermine their own literary aspirations and the project of Hebrew literature as a whole. I show that, in the wake of the nihilist critique in the 1860s, yeshiva-educated writers began to turn against the newly formed sphere of Hebrew letters with the accusation that a \"useless\" textual engagement characteristic of Talmud study pervaded the Hebrew literary production of their day. I track the development of this idea in the debates of pioneering Hebrew writers and literary critics such as Abraham Uri Kovner, his lesser-known brother Isaac Kovner, and the writer Abraham Ber Gottlober. Reading early Jewish writers and critics alongside their Russian contemporaries, this article illuminates the struggle of modern Hebrew writers with the Jewish religious textual tradition, while situating it in the context of larger Russian debates about literature's value and function in the world.
Journal Article
Nihilism and technology
This paper analyzes the relationship between nihilism and technology based on the intuitions of the Jewish-German philosopher Hans Jonas. To do this, we start from a consideration of nihilism in its incomplete form as an attempt to deny worldly and human reality, an attitude that gives technology a role of removing the human from the world, either through an escape from the earth or through post- and transhumanist hypotheses, based on the obsolescence of the body. The theses that see technology both as a philosophical and an ethical problem are examined from the perspective that ethics must be a kind of comple- ment (a “power over power”) to technology. To this, it would take on a new role: through responsibility it will help to adequately design the prognosis of the future and at the same time promote ecologically appropriate lifestyles based on frugality and continence.
Journal Article