Emanuele Severino Quotes on Knowledge

Emanuele Severino (1929–2020), the Italian philosopher whose The Essence of Nihilism (1972), Returning to Parmenides (1964), and the long subsequent corpus on destiny, technology, and the Western tradition gave late-twentieth-century Italian thought one of its most ambitious metaphysical positions, defended the case that the entire history of Western philosophy from Plato onward rests on the nihilistic supposition that beings are the kind of thing that can come into and pass out of existence. The recovery of the Parmenidean thesis that being cannot not be — that every being is eternal — frames Severino's diagnosis of the cognitive disorder underlying the modern technological civilization whose project of universal manipulation presupposes the very nihilism the recovery is designed to overcome.