This book addresses concerns about educational and moral standards in a world increasingly characterised by nihilism. On the one hand there is widespread anxiety that standards are falling; on the other, new machinery of accountability and inspection to show that they are not. The authors in this book state that we cannot avoid nihilism if we are simply laissez-faire about values, neither can we reduce them to standards of performance, nor must we return to traditional values. They state that we need to create a new set of values based on a critical assessment of contemporary practice in the light of a number of philosophical texts that address the question of nihilism, including the work of Nietzsche.

This book addresses concerns about educational and moral standards in a world increasingly characterised by nihilism. On the one hand there is widespread anxiety that standards are falling; on the other, new machinery of accountability and inspection to show that they are not. The authors in this book state that we cannot avoid nihilism if we are simply laissez-faire about values, neither can we reduce them to standards of performance, nor must we return to traditional values. They state that we need to create a new set of values based on a critical assessment of contemporary practice in the light of a number of philosophical texts that address the question of nihilism, including the work of Nietzsche.

This book addresses concerns about educational and moral standards in a world increasingly characterised by nihilism. On the one hand there is widespread anxiety that standards are falling; on the other, new machinery of accountability and inspection to show that they are not. The authors in this book state that we cannot avoid nihilism if we are simply laissez-faire about values, neither can we reduce them to standards of performance, nor must we return to traditional values. They state that we need to create a new set of values based on a critical assessment of contemporary practice in the light of a number of philosophical texts that address the question of nihilism, including the work of Nietzsche.

The Age of Nihilism explores the ruinous philosophies currently underwriting the devastating slow-motion implosion of Western civilization. Most Western democracies structure their social and political orders around a vague, poorly defined body of ideas called “progressive” and whose stated goal is “social justice.” But using sources as powerful and diverse as Plato, Friedrich Nietzsche, Herman Melville, and Albert Camus, McManus explodes the myth of progress and unmasks the falsehood of social justice. He argues instead for cycles of history, and in doing so, McManus reveals that the citizens of twenty-first century Western democracies exist in the fast-fading twilight of an increasingly distempered civilization whose fate was always determined. We designate as “progress” the cultural and social changes of the past thirty years. But it is not progress. It is nihilism. And it is the presence of nihilism itself that informs us that we are living at the end of an age.

Under the influence of science, modern civilization has adopted the view that only things that can be verified empirically or arrived at rationally are true. Modern people tend to regard themselves as mechanisms, without any subjective aspects to their nature. In this insightful and passionately concerned book, British educationist and man of letters David Holbrook retorts persuasively that this reductive view of human nature is profoundly false. Man's inner, subjective life is essential to his nature, what happens to his consciousness is the most important thing in his life, and his greatest need is to find meaning. Holbrook also warns that reductionism has pernicious, even lethal, cultural, social, and political consequences. The logical result is nihilism: if human beings and existence are but physical mechanisms, it necessarily follows that consciousness does not exist, life is meaningless, our concern with moral values is pointless, and so are our lives and actions. Life itself reduces to nothing but self-indulgence and self-assertion. A culture informed by this perspective is necessarily full of expressions of hate and meaninglessness, which coarsens and demoralizes the majority of the population and worsens the mental pathologies of unstable persons. "Egoistical nihilism" becomes ever more widespread, and a decent society becomes impossible. Holbrook advances a keenly insightful and eloquent critique of the radical individualism of Max Stirner's famous tract The Ego and His Own. Stirner's worldview, he argues, is grounded in psychopathology and takes the nihilist assumptions of modernity to their logical conclusion: "the unique one" totally detached from society and reducing others to mere means to his ends, fair game for exploitation unfettered by ethical considerations. Ominously, he notes, the Stirnerean attitude toward existence is becoming increasingly common. Against the reductive perspective of positivism, Holbrook argues that scientific investigations establish the reality of meaning and of values rooted in love. He calls for a reaffirmation of both. Originally published in 1977, Education, Nihilism, and Survival speaks prophetically and even more urgently to us today. The worsening coarseness, nihilism, and brutality of our culture, the partisan fanaticisms and widespread alienation and apathy of our politics, and horrors such as school shootings reveal the consequences of radical individualism. Education, Nihilism, and Survival will be of interest to well-educated general readers concerned at the state of culture and society; educators alarmed at harmful approaches in education; and psychologists and philosophers concerned about existentialism, Stirner's egoist philosophy, and the need for meaningful, philosophical anthropology. David Holbrook is an emeritus fellow of Downing College and lecturer. Among his books are Sex and Dehumanization and Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence, also available from Transaction.

"In 1962, the young Eugene Rose undertook to write a monumental chronicle of the abandonment of Truth in the modern age. Of the hundreds of pages of material he compiled for this work, only the present essay, on Nihilism, has come down to us in completed form. Here Eugene reveals the core of all modern thought and life--the belief that all truth is relative--and shows how this belief has been translated into action in our era. Today, nearly half a century after he wrote it, this essay is more timely than ever. It clearly explains why contemporary ideas, values, and attitudes--the "spirit of the age"--are shifting so rapidly in the direction of moral anarchy, as the philosophy of Nihilism enters more deeply into the fiber of society. Nietszche was right when he predicted that the twentieth century would usher in "the triumph of Nihilism."--Back cover.

On the occasion of the retirement of Paul Smeyers, this book considers the state and status of the philosophy and history of education today. Over the last 20 years, the conditions in which research takes place have changed considerably. They have done so in ways that are often less than favourable to disciplines such as history and philosophy of education, and the space and time for the practices that constitute these disciplines – of reading, of writing, of collegiality – is increasingly under pressure. During this time, the Research Community on the History and Philosophy of Educational Research has convened annually to bring its critical lenses to bear on these emergent conditions and to suggest ways that educational research might, or ought to, be done otherwise. As co-founder and co-convenor of the Research Community, this volume explores and recounts Paul Smeyers' development of Wittgensteinian scholarship and its legacy in education, his formative role in the development of philosophy of education as an international field, his many international collaborations, the “useless” educational-philosophical deepening of concepts, and the wider educational-philosophical import of this. This gives rise to consideration of the failure of these fields to halt the changes in the governance and status of the university that threatens them, and those practices that remain and that are emerging in academia that we wish to protect, to pass on to the next generation of researchers in these fields.