Heidegger and the Death of God: Between Plato and Nietzsche, by Duane Armitage
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Heidegger and the Death of God: Between Plato and Nietzsche, analyzes the epistemological commitments of Martin Heidegger in terms of the polarity offered by Plato and Nietzsche as they argue for the proper account of reality, that is, the ontological status of intelligibility, meaning, truth, and being.On the one hand, Plato represents a transcendent idealism, that of the forms, in which truth, being, and intelligibility are mind-independent, thus grounding the changing sensible world on the fixed, invisible world of being.Moreover, this Platonism is inherently theistic, grounding the intelligibility of being in the existence of God (much like the rational theism of Cartesianism for which Armitage also advocates).On the other hand, Nietzsche represents the gross materialistic reductionism of modern science and technology that results in an atheistic nihilism and relativism.This Nietzscheanism reduces all metaphysical claims to natural processes and the will to power -things are true insofar as they are of use to the exercise of one's will, including notions of God.Armitage situates Heidegger in the midst of this battle between the giants of materialism (Nietzsche) and the gods of idealism (Plato), with reference to the Gigantomachy rhetorically sketched by Plato in The Sophist.Heidegger offers Armitage a purported third way to overcome metaphysics outside the boundaries of the battle between the gods and giants: a perspectival understanding of being that mediates the two realms of being and becoming through a rendering of the Platonic notion of methexis (participation) via alethia (truth).Heidegger comes close to resolving the Gigantomachy with what Armitage describes as his "meta-metaphysical" position on the importance and necessity of doing metaphysics and his attempt to overcome nihilism via art.Yet even Heidegger's attempted third way via art is itself already posited by Plato, as noted by John Sallis, leaving one caught amidst the battle of the Gigantomachy.Building on the work of Thomas Nagel, Armitage advocates for the necessity of metaphysics and transcendence in the manner of Plato's ontologically independent forms.Ultimately, Armitage argues that both Nietzsche and Heidegger fail to sufficiently ground the intelligibility of being and truth.Armitage structures the text well, concisely rendering each chapter.In the introductory chapter, Armitage sketches the gist of his argument, highlighting the stakes of the Gigantomachy with an either-or proposition.Either meaning, intelligibility, logic, reason, etc. are real or they are not.If yes, then Platonism and Theism.If no, then Nietzcheanism and atheistic nihilism (6).In the second chapter, Armitage criticizes Nietzsche's philosophy of science as a self-defeating materialism and atheism that relies on making metaphysical truth claims which become a merely
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".