The Last Fumes: Nihilism and the Nature of Philosophical Concepts

“The last fumes of the evaporating reality” are for Nietzsche philosophical concepts, such as truth, being, or good. Nietzsche thought an “active nihilist” should do away with these fumes. The author, reflecting on Nietzsche’s insight, argues that concepts of this sort are the conditions of thought, so you cannot avoid using them, more or less knowingly. Philosophical concepts are frail and typically inconsistent entities, but they are at the same time unavoidable. The author reconsiders metaphysical and epistemological nihilism from this perspective. One cannot be substantively nihilist: one cannot deny truth, being and good (because you need them in order to deny anything). But, as Hegel held, nihilism is the first awareness of philosophy as it reveals the nature of philosophical concepts, and guarantees the preliminary freedom that is needed in philosophical reasoning and arguing. The Last Fumes: Nihilism and the nature of philosophical concepts explores contemporary debates — on truth, paradoxes, contradiction, non-existent objects — in both continental and analytical philosophy. The work proposes a new philosophical perspective through combining an original reading of Hegel with the account of being and truth typical of analytical philosophers sensitive to conceptual dialectics, and develops an original synthesis, based on the fundamental convergence of analytic and continental philosophy on topics of general interest such as nihilism and scepticism, truth, and existence.