International Nietzsche Studies – serie

In recent years, both analytic thinkers and postmodern theorists have looked at Friedrich Nietzsche's epistemology from the perspectives of their philosophical traditions. Michael Steven Green's penetrating study tries instead to do justice to Nietzsche's views on truth and knowledge by looking at them from the perspective of his contemporaries, particularly the Neo-Kantian philosopher Afrikan Spir, whose ideas exerted a tremendous influence on Nietzsche's thought. Despite his generally naturalist outlook, Nietzsche was committed to an antinaturalist theory of cognition inherited from Kant and Spir. Green shows how this fundamental tension in Nietzsche's thought led him to present not only the antirealism that has commonly been attributed to him in the past, but two other epistemological positions. These are a denial of the possibility of human thought entirely, and an error theory–-the argument that all of our judgments are false–-that has strong parallels in Spir's thought and Kant's antinomies. Viewing Nietzsche's error theory in light of Kantian transcendental idealism, Green makes sense of arguments that have previously confounded Nietzsche interpreters. Green also provides the first English translations of many passages from Spir's writings and Nietzsche's notebooks. In examining Nietzsche's thought through the lens of the philosophical influences upon him–-the philosophers that Nietzsche himself read–-Green establishes a significant new foundation from which to assess Nietzsche's place in modern philosophy and culture.

An important figure in the development of Nietzsche scholarship, Mazzino Montinari (1928-86) dedicated himself to the detailed study of the philosopher’s writings. This lifetime of scholarship crystallized in Montinari’s work as coeditor of the critical edition of Nietzsche’s collected writings. Reading Nietzsche, now available in English for the first time, is a group of essays that grew out of this monumental work.In Reading Nietzsche Montinari tackles such subjects as the relationship between Nietzsche and Wagner, early drafts of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and the philosopher’s reputation among the Nazis and Marxists of the 1930s and 1940s. He also deals authoritatively with a number of figures who have had an unfortunate influence upon the way Nietzsche has been understood, from the chief Nazi interpreter of Nietzsche, Alfred BÄumler, to the chief Marxist interpreter, Georg LukÀcs, to Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth.

This book contains the first English translations of The Origin of the Moral Sensations and Psychological Observations, the two most important works by the German philosopher Paul RÉe. These essays present RÉe’s moral philosophy, which influenced the ideas of his close friend Friedrich Nietzsche considerably.  Nietzsche scholars have often incorrectly attributed to him arguments and ideas that are RÉe’s and have failed to detect responses to RÉe’s works in Nietzsche’s writings. RÉe’s thinking combined two strands: a pessimistic conception of human nature, presented in the French moralists’ aphoristic style that would become a mainstay of Nietzsche’s own writings, and a theory of morality derived from Darwin’s theory of natural selection. RÉe’s moral Darwinism was a central factor prompting Nietzsche to write On the Genealogy of Morals and the groundwork for much of today’s “evolutionary ethics.”In an illuminating critical introduction, Robin Small examines RÉe’s life and work, locating his application of evolutionary concepts to morality within a broader history of Darwinism while exploring RÉe’s theoretical and personal relationship with Nietzsche. In placing Nietzsche in his intellectual and social context, Small profoundly challenges the myth of Nietzsche as a solitary thinker.

Friedrich Nietzsche was immensely influential and, counter to most expectations, also very well read. An essential new reference tool for those interested in his thinking, Nietzsche’s Philosophical Context identifies the chronology and huge range of philosophical books that engaged him. Rigorously examining the scope of this reading, Thomas H. Brobjer consulted over two thousand volumes in Nietzsche’s personal library, as well as his book bills, library records, journals, letters, and publications. This meticulous investigation also considers many of the annotations in his books. In arguing that Nietzsche’s reading often constituted the starting point for, or counterpoint to, much of his own thinking and writing, Brobjer’s study provides scholars with fresh insight into how Nietzsche worked and thought; to which questions and thinkers he responded; and by which of them he was influenced. The result is a new and much more contextual understanding of Nietzsche's life and thinking.

Anticipating contemporary deconstructive readings of philosophical texts,Georg Simmel pits the two German masters of philosophy of life againsteach other in a play of opposition and supplementation. This first Englishtranslation of Simmel's work includes an extensive introduction, providingthe reader with ready access to the text by mapping its discursive strategies.

Nietzsche's Revaluation of Values is an assessment of Nietzsche's challenging plan to revalue all values, including knowledge, morality, religion, art, and the state. E. E. Sleinis analyzes the success of Nietzsche's enterprise as well as its inadequacies; among the positive contributions he singles out Nietzsche's theory of value, his conception of higher-order values, and his conception of the maximally affirmative attitude as creations of enduring importance.

From The Birth of Tragedy on, Nietzsche worked to comprehend thenature of the individual. Richard White shows how Nietzsche was inspiredand guided by the question of personal "sovereignty" and howthrough his writings he sought to provoke the very sovereignty he described.White argues that Nietzsche is a philosopher our contemporary age musttherefore come to understand if we are ever to secure a genuinely meaningfuldirection for the future. Profoundly relevant to our era, Nietzsche'sphilosophy addresses a version of individuality that allows us to movebeyond the self-dispossession of mass society and the alternative of selfishindividualism--to fully understand how one becomes what one is.A volume in the International Nietzsche Studies series, edited by Richard Schacht

This is the first translation into English of a milestone in Nietzsche interpretation. Wolfgang MÜller-Lauter examines Nietzsche's doctrines of the will to power and the overman in light of Nietzsche's philosophy of real contradictions. He shows that Nietzsche's vision of inherently contradictory "wills to power" is the source of irresolvable contradictions in his philosophy.  MÜller-Lauter has remained at the forefront of German Nietzsche studies throughout the quarter century since this book first appeared.  This long-awaited translation, containing two substantial subsequent essays, is a major addition to the English-language Nietzsche literature

In Nietzsche's Perspectivism, Steven Hales and Rex Welshon offer an analytic approach to Nietzsche's important idea that truth is perspectival. Drawing on Nietzsche's entire published corpus, along with manuscripts he never saw to press, they assess the different perspectivisms at work in Nietzsche's views with regard to truth, logic, causality, knowledge, consciousness, and the self. They also examine Nietzsche's perspectivist ontology of power and the attendant claims that substances and subjects are illusory while forces and alliances of power constitute the only reality.  Hales and Welshon present Nietzsche's treatment of perspectivism as both more complex and more fruitful than the common view of it as a doctrine that truth is not objective. Neither a metaphor nor a methodology, perspectivism emerges as a protean concept akin to a unifying theme; an alternative to the absolutism that recurs in science, philosophy, and religion; and a technique for revealing the unimagined possibilities open to every individual.

The first English translation of Nietzsche