Term invented or popularized by Russian novelist Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818-1883) in his novel Fathers and Sons (1861) for the rejection of all traditional values.
Literally meaning ‘nothingism’, the term can be applied to views saying that all knowledge is impossible, that all alleged metaphysical truths or values are illusory, or that ethical values cannot be given any foundation and so are arbitrary.
‘Nihilism’ has been applied particularly to a movement in Czarist Russia which held that any means were permissible in overthrowing the existing order (the value of overthrowing it being tacitly taken for granted), and to later offshoots and imitations of that movement elsewhere.
The term is in fact seldom used in modern English-speaking philosophy.
Table of Contents
- 1 Videos
- 2 Related Products
- 2.1 Nihilism (MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)
- 2.2 The Yellow Birds
- 2.3 Nihilism: A Philosophy Based In Nothingness And Eternity
- 2.4 Waves '98
- 2.5 Medical Nihilism
- 2.6 Beyond Good and Evil
- 2.7 The Age of Nihilism: An Inquiry into the Death of Western Democracy or, The Consequences of Philosophy
- 2.8 Nothing & Everything: How to stop fearing nihilism and embrace the void
- 2.9 Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation
- 2.10 F**k It: The Ultimate Spiritual Way
Last update 2020-06-17. Price and product availability may change.