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.