Nietzsche und die historisch-kritische Philologie

“It is not for nothing that one has been a philologist, perhaps one is a philologist still!” – Throughout his work, Nietzsche has paid numerous tributes to philological scholarship. On the basis of a wide variety of sources, this study undertakes to demonstrate the deep impact of the historical-critical philology in which he had been trained. Nietzsche did not abandon philology in favour of philosophy but openly acknowledged his debt to its methods, especially in his later writings. This insight contributes to a reassessment of central concepts like text, genealogy, interpretation, or perspectivism, and it leads to a rejection of standard accounts in the theory of interpretation as well as in the history of scholarship. The book pleads for literary scholarship grounded in sceptical philology.