Herman Siemens – författare

While Nietzsche’s works and ideas are relevant across the many branches of philosophy, the themes of contest and conflict have been mostly overlooked. Conflict and Contest in Nietzsche’s Philosophy redresses this situation, arguing for the importance of these issues throughout Nietzsche’s work.The volume has three key lines of inquiry: Nietzsche’s ontology of conflict; Nietzsche’s conception of the agon; and Nietzsche’s warrior-philosophy. Under these three umbrellas is a collection of insightful and provocative essays considering, among other topics, Nietzsche’s understanding of resistance; his engagement with classical thinkers alongside his contemporaries, including Jacob Burckhardt; his views on language, metaphor and aphorism; and war, revolt and terror. In bringing together such topics, Conflict and Contest in Nietzsche’s Philosophy seeks to correct the one-sided tendencies within the existing literature to read simply 'hard' and 'soft' analyses of conflict.Written by scholars across the Anglophone and the European traditions, within and beyond philosophy, this collection emphasises the entire problematic of conflict in Nietzsche’s thought and its relation to his philosophical and literary practice.

While Nietzsche’s works and ideas are relevant across the many branches of philosophy, the themes of contest and conflict have been mostly overlooked. Conflict and Contest in Nietzsche’s Philosophy redresses this situation, arguing for the importance of these issues throughout Nietzsche’s work.The volume has three key lines of inquiry: Nietzsche’s ontology of conflict; Nietzsche’s conception of the agon; and Nietzsche’s warrior-philosophy. Under these three umbrellas is a collection of insightful and provocative essays considering, among other topics, Nietzsche’s understanding of resistance; his engagement with classical thinkers alongside his contemporaries, including Jacob Burckhardt; his views on language, metaphor and aphorism; and war, revolt and terror. In bringing together such topics, Conflict and Contest in Nietzsche’s Philosophy seeks to correct the one-sided tendencies within the existing literature to read simply 'hard' and 'soft' analyses of conflict.Written by scholars across the Anglophone and the European traditions, within and beyond philosophy, this collection emphasises the entire problematic of conflict in Nietzsche’s thought and its relation to his philosophical and literary practice.

The question of antagonism, struggle and dissensus, and their place, limits and value for democracy, has divided deliberative from agonistic theories in recent years and remains the main source of the impasse between them. This open access book seeks to break this impasse by going back to their sources in Kant (for deliberative theories) and Nietzsche (for agonisms) and reframing them as philosophers of conflict. For both philosophers, conflict is part of the ‘deep structure’ of reality at all levels, and their reflections on its constitutive, constructive and destructive potentials raise fundamental questions that democratic theories can ill afford to ignore.Through a series of text-based comparative studies of Kant’s and Nietzsche’s philosophies of conflict, Herman Siemens addresses the central question of the book: What does it take to think of conflict, real opposition or contradiction as an intrinsic dimension of reality? Drawing on Kant’s pre-critical writings and his historical-philosophical texts and Nietzsche’s philosophical physiology and the will to power, chapters examine topics such as logical opposition (contradiction) versus real opposition (Realrepugnanz); idealism as philosophical warfare; the relation between war and peace; destructive versus constructive forms of conflict; resistance as a stimulant; Kant’s ‘unsociable sociability’ and Nietzsche’s ‘fine, well-planned, thoughtful egoism’; hatred, revenge and the ‘slave revolt in morality’.The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Dutch Research Council.

The question of antagonism, struggle and dissensus, and their place, limits and value for democracy, has divided deliberative from agonistic theories in recent years and remains the main source of the impasse between them. This open access book seeks to break this impasse by going back to their sources in Kant (for deliberative theories) and Nietzsche (for agonisms) and reframing them as philosophers of conflict. For both philosophers, conflict is part of the ‘deep structure’ of reality at all levels, and their reflections on its constitutive, constructive and destructive potentials raise fundamental questions that democratic theories can ill afford to ignore.Through a series of text-based comparative studies of Kant’s and Nietzsche’s philosophies of conflict, Herman Siemens addresses the central question of the book: What does it take to think of conflict, real opposition or contradiction as an intrinsic dimension of reality? Drawing on Kant’s pre-critical writings and his historical-philosophical texts and Nietzsche’s philosophical physiology and the will to power, chapters examine topics such as logical opposition (contradiction) versus real opposition (Realrepugnanz); idealism as philosophical warfare; the relation between war and peace; destructive versus constructive forms of conflict; resistance as a stimulant; Kant’s ‘unsociable sociability’ and Nietzsche’s ‘fine, well-planned, thoughtful egoism’; hatred, revenge and the ‘slave revolt in morality’.The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Dutch Research Council.

Nietzsche’s legacy for political thought is a highly contested area of research today. With papers representing a broad range of positions, this collection takes stock of the central controversies (Nietzsche as political / anti-political thinker? Nietzsche and / contra democracy? Arendt and / contra Nietzsche?), as well as new research on key concepts (power, the agon, aristocracy, friendship i.a.), on historical, contemporary and futural aspects of Nietzsche’s political thought. International contributors include well-known names (Conway, Ansell-Pearson, Hatab, Taureck, Patton, Connolly, Villa, van Tongeren) and young emerging scholars from various disciplines.