Matt Fradd

I can form syllogisms.

I can say this conclusion follows from this premises.

But there's no ultimate reason why it makes sense.

Which means really ultimately my sense doesn't make sense.

And they don't realize what thin ice they're skating on.

Now that I think

That, I think, is partly where nihilism came from.

It's certainly where it came from in the case of Nietzsche.

He stops believing in God, he stops believing in a first cause, a reason why everything makes sense, a first sense, a first meaning, a first cause, and then he can't make sense of any of the subsequent causes and effects and meanings and inferences either.

No, he doesn't.

He doesn't even say that God doesn't exist, really.

He's not an atheist in that sense.

What he thinks is that reality is really not something that exists independently of us.

This is something that we're sort of constructing as we go along.

This is that weird idea of will to power.

And God was part of that for a while, and now he's not.

So it's not that there is a God or that there isn't a God, but we are doing that now, so God has died.

Oh yeah, sure.

Well, that was also true of many sort of forms of what you might call proto-nihilism, like Buddhism.

Buddhism really says,