“The development of history starts with tragic knowledge”: thus Karl Jaspers meditates on the genesis of human civilization. The tragicalness of historic knowledge realizes itself by passing through the problems of the limits of sense, and related to it, that of nothingness. The question about nihilism has its roots in this speculative ground, representing a kind of modern and polymorphic answer to ancient problems.

Nihilism: a vexed cultural event, that someone has defined “the deep soul of modernity”, is often turned into philosophical charges, aiming to discredit the opponents on logic and moral planes. Starting from Nietzsche, it has become an important basis for several thinkers, who interpreted it, case-by-case, as a transient decline from human rationality, or as the unavoidable result of postmodern fate, to the point that Wilhelm Weischedel defined contemporary thought as philosophizing “in the shade of nihilism”.

The “Bollettino Filosofico” aims to reintroduce the debate on the relation between nihilism and modernity, in order to explore its present conjugation in different disciplinary areas and fields (ethic, aesthetic, gnoseological, political and religious), in the light of the urgency that the questions about the crisis of sense, foundations and values raise in contemporary sensibility; the purpose is, on one hand, to focus the plurality of forms caused by reflecting on such a broad theme; on the other, to identify the unexplored paths of contemporary debate.