Now in Stock: Nishitani on Nihilism
JUST ARRIVED !!
My new book, NISHITANI ON NIHILISM: WESTERN PHILOSOPHY THROUGH JAPANESE EYES, is now in stock. The book is 150 pages in length and costs just 23 EUROS with free postage to anywhere in the world. The PayPal address is blackfrontpress@yahoo.co.uk and you can find more details below. Cover designed by Jeffrey Harrison.
IN 1943 Japanese thinker Nishitani Keiji (1900-1990) was given the Chair of Philosophy and Religion at Kyoto University, which he held until 1964. Initially targetted by the occupational U.S. administration in the wake of the country's disastrous participation in the Second World War, when the Americans had sought to root out and destroy all traces of Japan's traditional past, Nishitani was forced to abandon his calls for social reform and began to focus on the spiritual condition of the individual in a rapidly changing world. Nishitani subsequently travelled to Europe and the United States to address fellow academics and interested students on ways to identify both the nature and the source of the West's seemingly irrevocable descent into moral and spiritual chaos. Between 1937 and 1939 Nishitani attended Martin Heidegger's famous lectures at Freiburg University, adding the Swabian's metaphysical ideas - as well as those of Friedrich Niezsche - to his existing thoughts on Zen enlightenment. This led him to develop the unique and ground-breaking thesis that widespread disillusionment resulting from modernity can be successfully overcome by first recognising and then using nihilism against itself. Troy Southgate's new work explores Nishitani's observations on nihilism as they relate to the ideas of G.W.F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, Max Stirner, Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Martin Heidegger. This book comes at a time when European values have degenerated even further, calling for a re-evaluation of all values.