Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida - Paperback

by Allan Megill (Author)

Examines the philosophical works of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida, and analyzes the connections between their viewpoints.

Front Jacket

The 'extremities' of the four thinkers anatomized in this lucid, learned and commendably skeptical study--Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida--are crises. But they are crises of a very different order from those we would freely acknowledge to define our present condition: economic, environmental, moral, political. In the frantic self-portrait titled 'Ecce Homo, ' Nietzsche warns of 'a crisis without equal on earth . . . against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far.' In a late interview, Heidegger said, 'Only a god can save us.' . . . Save us from what, for what? Allan Megill, an associate professor of history at the University of Iowa, is fascinated by the cataclysmic diagnosis of his four extremists, but also dubious.--Arthur C. Danto, New York Times

Author Biography

Allan Megill is professor of history at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida and Karl Marx: The Burden of Reason (Why Marx Rejected Politics and the Market), and editor of Rethinking Objectivity.