Fundamental Tendency of Our Time

Emanuele Severino (1929 –2020) was an Italian philosopher. An original thinker and public intellectual, he is considered one of the most important Italian thinkers of the 20th century.Antimo Lucarelli is a translator at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, UK.

• Foreword, Ines Testoni, Damiano Sacco and Giulio Goggi“In Technology We Trust”: An Introduction to Emanuele Severino’s Understanding of the Human Technological Era, Antimo LucarelliIntroduction1. About the “Crisis”2. The Fundamental Tendency of Our Time and the Meaning of the Future3. The Ethics of Science 4. Élenchos 5. What is Europe?6. Notes on the Italian State of Affairs7. Summary: The West as the History of Nihilism Index

Emanuele Severino was one of the most lucid and radical thinkers of the twentieth century. He advocated the eternity of every being, denouncing as ‘folly’ the belief that anything could originate from or return to nothingness. Yet he saw the entire history of the West as deeply immersed in this very folly. In The Fundamental Tendency of Our Time, Severino explores some of the most concrete manifestations of this belief, which he calls ‘nihilism’. He analyzes the nature of technology and the development of history, offering a new—and for many, shocking—vision of where we come from, where we are, and where we are headed.