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(2006) Human Studies 29 (4).
G. Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation
From veritas to caritas, or how nihilism yields to democracy
Silvia Benso
pp. 503-508
“Veritatem facientes in caritate, a Pauline expression that echoes, and perhaps not so very distantly, the aletheuein [truthing, disclosing] of the Aristotelian Nicomachean Ethics, means, in terms of today’s philosophy, that the truth is born in consent and from consent, and not, vice versa, that agreement is reached when we have all discovered the same objective truth” (xxvi). These few lines condense the principal thesis supporting Nihilism and Emancipation by Gianni Vattimo, the Turin philosopher renowned worldwide especially for his daring proposal of a pensiero debole, or weak thought. Vattimo describes weak thought as “a weak ontology, or better, an ontology of the weakening of Being” (19), capable of recognizing “the vocation of the west for decline and the weakening of strong identities” and helping “us to conceive the inevitable westernization of the world in terms that we may venture to call light, mellow, and soft” (34). Vattimo, who studied with Heidegger and Gadamer and...
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/s10746-007-9044-y
Full citation:
Benso, S. (2006). Review of G. Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation. Human Studies 29 (4), pp. 503-508.
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