the ultimate guide to understanding a seminal thinker

Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo (Turin, 1936-2023) was one of the most effective actors of the present day who joined this debate with the diagnosis of European nihilism formulated by Nietzsche and Heidegger. With it, he revived aspects of the conservative cultural critique of the principles of the contemporary age, but now welcomed with optimism the liberating opportunity that could be seen as the end of the belief in a linear history of progress, such as the project of the great modern ideologies, from liberal to Marxist.

It was not about the joy of relativism until it was recognized that the philosophical discourse of modernity, nostalgic for solid foundations and immutable truths, was contaminated by metaphysical aspects of the past that needed to be revised. At the bottom if you were looking for it another detour to the secularization process. This is what Vattimo meant by the term weak thinking.

In 1971, before the printing of some of his most famous books of the present time—A sad thought (1983), The end of modernity (1985), A transparent company (1989) – Vattimo published this excellent monograph, now published in Herder, by one of his main intellectual referents on Nietzsche and Gadamer.

It burdens the passing time, it burdens that in Castellano we count on other great introductions to Heideggerian thinking by specialists like Ramón Rodríguez or Arthur Leytethe decision to save this text is very certain: it is the completion of the author’s work Ser y pace through an interpreter of exception who has well understood the testimony of his project of deconstructing metaphysics by replacing the traditional conception of the self as immutable permanence with the meaning of an “event” mediated by time and language, and who also writes with enviable clarityit allows us to capture the essence of this idea in this mysterious, prophetic tone, with the flair of the “wizard of Messkirch”, and connect it directly to our present.

This book allows us to explore the fullness of Heidegger’s work through an exceptional interpreter

So Vattimo continues his work “urbanizar” the Heideggerian province from his teacher to his former student Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer: en Ser y pacethe work with which Heidegger revolutionized the philosophical world in 1927, the idea that the human being is constitutively open to the question of the sense of his existence, without being able to give a definitive answer to this questioner, was resolved at the end of the radical call to the unbearable decision of man, I wonder how to lead my life.

Gadamer attempted to remedy the decisiveness and solipsism of this ontology of finitude with the apelación a shared historical horizon from which our uncertain reactions to the depths of existence can be constructed in dialogue.

By combining this hermeneutic mathematics with Rorty’s neopragmatism, Vattimo has read it Ser y pace which emphasizes the analysis of the practical environment from which our first orientation before the world is based, in order to express more fluidly the ontological theme of the first Heidegger with his later meditation on technology as an expression of the forgetting of this open, non-manipulable figure of ser.

So this book offers us, in an orderly way, without dealing with the difficulties of the Heideggerian world, a complete and didactic overview of the work of one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. Its clarification is contributed by Alberto Ciria’s translation for this new edition of Herder, which greatly improves the previous version by Gedisa.