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Hello, the 19th century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote there can be no doubt that morality will gradually perish

This is the great spectacle in a hundred acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe and with chilling predictions like this

nihilisms sped on its way the hard view that morals are pointless loyalty is a weakness and truths are illusory

It's excited confused and appalled Western thinkers ever since

But what happened to Nietzsche's revolutionary ideas about truth morality and a life without meaning existentialism can claim lineage to Nietzsche as

Can post modernism but then so can Nazism but so many interpretations and claims of ownership from the left and the right has

Anything positive come out of the great philosopher of nothing

We'd mean to discuss Nietzsche and nihilism are the philosopher Rob Hopkins from the University of Birmingham

Professor Raymond Talis doctor

Philosopher and a critic of the person modernists and also with us is one of their staunch defenders professor Catherine Bellsy from the University of Cardiff

Let's talk first about Nietzsche and the Enlightenment Nietzsche the second half of the

19th century German Prussian

Like his father he died in Sain

Rob Hopkins nihilism brings to mind despair and purposelessness and the love of destruction

How far these central to the Nietzsche's ideas?

They're central though not because not in the way that he supported those who use in the end

He thought nihilism was a phenomenon of enormous cultural importance

That had come marked the development of Western civilization at a certain crucial point

But he thought it was a form of sickness reflecting deep powerful pressures within Western society

That and he thought that in the end this sickness had to be overcome

...