Peter Poellner - Böcker

Value in Modernity examines a historical paradigm in ethics that has hitherto not been identified as such: existential modernism. Peter Poellner discusses the central claims of this paradigm through detailed examination of the thought of four of its main exponents: Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Scheler, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Robert Musil. In the case of Nietzsche and Sartre, Poellner offers novel interpretations, reconstructing lines of thought in their work that have usually been neglected. He also offers a new assessment of Scheler's subtle phenomenological version of affective value intuitionism, which is a crucial influence on Sartre's existentialism but has so far enjoyed virtually no reception in an anglophone context. Musil's philosophical novel The Man without Qualities is interpreted as contributing a highly original version of ethical perfectionism to the existential modernist paradigm. While Musil's thought on emotions and moods has begun to receive philosophical recognition in recent years, the significance of the philosophical core of his seminal work has so far not been fully appreciated. In Poellner's interpretation, what we find in the existential modernists is an approach in ethical philosophy that combines a qualified form of affective value intuitionism and a kind of ethical perfectionism. This book reconstructs and defends a version of this approach that integrates elements drawn from each of these thinkers, supplemented by an original elaboration of ideas only implicit in some of them.

The last decade has seen a very considerable revival of interest in Nietzsche. However, many of the studies available in English fail to do justice to the complexity of his writings and tend to involve only very partial and limited readings of his work. This book offers a new and comprehensive interpretation and a detailed critical assessment of Nietzsche's later ideas on epistemology and metaphysics, drawing extensively not only on his published works but also his voluminous notebooks, largely unpublished in English.The author examines Nietzsche's various distinct lines of thought on the traditionally central areas of philosophy and shows in what specific sense Nietzsche, as he himself claimed, might be said to have moved beyond these questions. Throughout the book, considerable attention is paid both to the historical context of his writings and to subsequent developments in philosophy--English-language as well as Continental European.Among the themes discussed are Nietzsche's relation to scepticism and to evolutionary epistemology; his analysis of `objective reality' and the associated `perspectivism'; his criticism of the metaphysician's `will to truth' and the related analysis of the intellectual paradigm he called the `ascetic ideal'; and his notion of unconscious mental states; and the concept of the will to power and its relation to metaphysics. Dr Peollner, while recognizing the originality of Nietzsche's influential new philosophical paradigm, shows that his thought has closer affinities to the orthodox philosophical tradition than is generally supposed.