1. BEYOND THE MYTH OF OBJECTIVE TRUTH
1. For a detailed analysis of the political consequences of the philosophy of Nietzsche and Heidegger, see Vattimo (2003).
2. On the correspondence between hermeneutics and democracy, see Vattimo (2003, chap. 8).
3. For more thorough consideration of Hannah Arendt’s politics, see the excellent book by Savarino (1997).
4. The reference is to the statement that “Mussolini never killed anyone,” made by the Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, to the English journalists Boris Johnson and Nicholas Farrell and published in The Spectator (September 11, 2003).
5. A slightly modified version of this section was published as chapter 7 of Nihilism and Emancipation (“Philosophy, Metaphysics, Democracy”). I have included the essay here because of a necessary theoretical coherence with the theme of this book.
6. On the tendency of much twentieth-century philosophy to take the form of reflection on the contemporary situation, to the point of seeming to be a sort of “sociological impressionism,” see Vattimo (1990).
2. THE FUTURE OF RELIGION
1. “Das Sein eigens denken, verlangt, das Sein als den Grund des Seienden fahren zu lassen zugunsten des im Entbergen verborgen spielenden Gebens, d.h. des Es gibt.” Martin Heidegger, “Zeit und Sein” (1962), in Zur Sache des Denkens (Heidegger 1969). [Vattimo cites this passage from memory, in the compressed form “Das Sein als Grund fahren lassen,” which my translation renders. Compare Joan Stambaugh’s translation of the whole sentence in Martin Heidegger, “Time and Being,” in On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 6: “To think Being explicitly requires us to relinquish Being as the ground of beings in favor of the giving which prevails concealed in unconcealment, that is, in favor of the It gives.”—WM]
2. I have in mind a survey done several years ago, which led to a book by the Catholic philosopher Pietro Prini, Lo scisma sommerso (1999).
3. This is the title of a great book of fundamental theology by Father R. Garrigou-Lagrange (1914).
3. THE END OF PHILOSOPHY
1. A slightly modified version of this section was previously published as chapter 3 in Nihilism and Emancipation (“Ethics of Provenance”). I have included the essay because of its necessary theoretical coherence with the theme of this book.
3. See her translation of Heidegger (1954) in Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1973).
4. For the meaning of this reprise, see particularly Charles Taylor (1975, 1979).