Article/Publication Details

      Conor Cunningham, the associate professor in Theology and Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, University of Nottingham. His expertise includes: philosophical theology, systematic theology, the relationship between science and theology, phenomenology and metaphysics. Conor’s first monograph was Genealogy of Nihilism: Philosophies of Nothing and the Difference of Theology (Routledge: London and New York, 2002). It has Spanish and Chinese translations, and the Chinese translation was published by East China Normal University Press in 2022 (translator: Li Yun). His other works include: Darwin’s Pious Idea: Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get It Wrong (Wm B Eerdmans Publishing: Grand Rapids and Cambridge, 2010), which has been translated into Spanish, Russian, and Korean. At the moment, Prof. Cunningham is writing three-volumes under the title of (Under contract with Wipf & Stock): Soul and the Marriage of Discourse: A Summa for Science after Naturalness. Volume One: Body (Science), Volume Two: Soul (Philosophy), and Volume Three: Spirit (Theology). 

“For the given-ness of the creature,
which resists destruction yet is itself an ecstatic opening,
possesses a qualitative infinity as an imitable example of the divine essence.
Furthermore, it proceeds within the circle of the divine procession.”1
Conor Cunningham, Genealogy of Nihilism

Introduction

In this epoch, Nihilism is our paramount context. Most readers may look with favour upon such a view that nihilism is the essence of modernity. However, isn’t there any nihilism in the ancient world? In the majority, the nihilism has a pedigree going back to Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743-1819). Instead, Conor’s genealogy starts from Plotinus (205-270). He believes, that since Plotinus’ works, for philosophy, the nothing as something has become everything. It argues that, on the one hand, in philosophies of nothing, it cannot speak without causing that about which it is speaking to disappear; on the other hand, theological discourse will enable us to say, to do, and to see2. In a word, nihilism has been understood as plenitude – generating the excessive intelligibility from the negative in philosophies of nothing, but, for his theology, to admit the excessive directly in the activities themselves of to say, to do, and to see. The activities themselves are just imitations of God. In this sense, Conor re-examines the legitimacy of nihilism, and give us a unique way to overcome nihilism. Maybe it’s the very moment that we take the gift from nihilism, whatever we taking care of ourselves in philosophical or theological practice.