Matthew Meyer – författare

The Routledge Guidebook to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra is an engaging introduction to this rich and provocative philosophical text. Nietzsche is arguably one of the most influential and yet least understood philosophers of the nineteenth century. The same can be said of his self-proclaimed magnum opus, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The work has influenced everything from poetry, literature, and music to philosophy, psychoanalysis, and soldiers on the battlefields of World War I. Its contents, however, are still far from being understood. On the one hand, the principal aims and even the genre of Zarathustra remain unclear. On the other hand, the work expresses, in poetic fashion, some of Nietzsche’s most important, controversial, and enigmatic doctrines: the Üebermensch, the eternal recurrence of the same, and the will to power.The Routledge Guidebook to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra is essential reading for students of nineteenth-century philosophy, German philosophy, and intellectual history and suitable for anyone studying Nietzsche’s most famous text for the first time.

The Routledge Guidebook to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra is an engaging introduction to this rich and provocative philosophical text. Nietzsche is arguably one of the most influential and yet least understood philosophers of the nineteenth century. The same can be said of his self-proclaimed magnum opus, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The work has influenced everything from poetry, literature, and music to philosophy, psychoanalysis, and soldiers on the battlefields of World War I. Its contents, however, are still far from being understood. On the one hand, the principal aims and even the genre of Zarathustra remain unclear. On the other hand, the work expresses, in poetic fashion, some of Nietzsche’s most important, controversial, and enigmatic doctrines: the Üebermensch, the eternal recurrence of the same, and the will to power.The Routledge Guidebook to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra is essential reading for students of nineteenth-century philosophy, German philosophy, and intellectual history and suitable for anyone studying Nietzsche’s most famous text for the first time.

Recent Anglophone scholarship has successfully shown that Nietzsche's thought makes important contributions to a wide range of contemporary philosophical debates. In so doing, however, scholarship has lost sight of another important feature of Nietzsche's project, namely his desire to challenge the very conception of philosophy that has been used to assess his merits as a philosopher. In other words, contemporary scholarship has overlooked Nietzsche's contributions to metaphilosophy, i.e. debates around the nature, methods, and aims of philosophy. This important new collection of essays brings together an international group of distinguished scholars to explore and discuss these contributions and debates. It will appeal to anyone interested in metaphilosophy, Nietzsche studies, German studies, or intellectual history.

Recent Anglophone scholarship has successfully shown that Nietzsche's thought makes important contributions to a wide range of contemporary philosophical debates. In so doing, however, scholarship has lost sight of another important feature of Nietzsche's project, namely his desire to challenge the very conception of philosophy that has been used to assess his merits as a philosopher. In other words, contemporary scholarship has overlooked Nietzsche's contributions to metaphilosophy, i.e. debates around the nature, methods, and aims of philosophy. This important new collection of essays brings together an international group of distinguished scholars to explore and discuss these contributions and debates. It will appeal to anyone interested in metaphilosophy, Nietzsche studies, German studies, or intellectual history.

Between 1878 and 1882, Nietzsche published what he called 'the free spirit works': Human, All Too Human; Assorted Opinions and Maxims; The Wanderer and His Shadow; Daybreak; and The Gay Science. Often approached as a mere assemblage of loosely connected aphorisms, these works are here re-interpreted as a coherent narrative of the steps Nietzsche takes in educating himself toward freedom that executes a dialectic between scientific truth-seeking and artistic life-affirmation. Matthew Meyer's new reading of these works not only provides a more convincing explanation of their content but also makes better sense of the relationship between them and Nietzsche's larger oeuvre. His argument shows how these texts can and should be read as a unified project even while they present multiple, in some cases conflicting, images of the free spirit. The book will appeal to anyone who is interested in Nietzsche's philosophy and especially to those puzzled about how to understand the peculiarities of the free spirit works.

Between 1878 and 1882, Nietzsche published what he called 'the free spirit works': Human, All Too Human; Assorted Opinions and Maxims; The Wanderer and His Shadow; Daybreak; and The Gay Science. Often approached as a mere assemblage of loosely connected aphorisms, these works are here re-interpreted as a coherent narrative of the steps Nietzsche takes in educating himself toward freedom that executes a dialectic between scientific truth-seeking and artistic life-affirmation. Matthew Meyer's new reading of these works not only provides a more convincing explanation of their content but also makes better sense of the relationship between them and Nietzsche's larger oeuvre. His argument shows how these texts can and should be read as a unified project even while they present multiple, in some cases conflicting, images of the free spirit. The book will appeal to anyone who is interested in Nietzsche's philosophy and especially to those puzzled about how to understand the peculiarities of the free spirit works.

Nietzsche’s work was shaped by his engagement with ancient Greek philosophy. Matthew Meyer analyzes Nietzsche’s concepts of becoming and perspectivism and his alleged rejection of the principle of non-contradiction, and he traces these views back to the Heraclitean-Protagorean position that Plato and Aristotle critically analyze in the Theaetetus and Metaphysica IV, respectively. At the center of this Heraclitean-Protagorean position is a relational ontology in which everything exists and is what it is only in relation to something else. Meyer argues that this relational ontology is not only theoretically foundational for Nietzsche’s philosophical project, in that it is the common element in Nietzsche’s views on becoming, perspectivism, and the principle of non-contradiction, but also textually foundational, in that Nietzsche implicitly commits himself to such an ontology in raising the question of opposites at the beginning of both Human, All Too Human and Beyond Good and Evil.