4 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
Charles Taylor's 2007 magnum opus asking why it was virtually impossible not to believe in God in 1500 and now virtually impossible for many to believe — arguing that secularity is not simply the absence of religion but a new positive condition of immanent meaning-making within a 'closed world structure.'
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's two-part dramatic poem — Faust Part I (1808) and Part II (1832) — following the scholar Faust who makes a wager with Mephistopheles: if Faust ever finds a moment so satisfying he wishes it to last forever, Mephistopheles owns his soul.
Father Seraphim Rose's 1994 posthumously published analysis of the nihilist trajectory of modern Western thought — arguing from an Orthodox Christian perspective that liberalism, realism, vitalism, and destructivism represent four stages of Western civilization's progressive abandonment of truth.
John Vervaeke's philosophical framework — developed primarily through his YouTube lecture series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis (2019) — describing the historically traceable loss of meaning, connectedness, and participatory knowing in modernity — the most systematic contemporary philosophical diagnosis of existential alienation.