An Interpretation of Nietzsche's On the Uses and Disadvantage of History for Life PDF Download

Author: Anthony K. Jensen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317597230
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
With his An Interpretation of Nietzsche’s "On the Uses and Disadvantage of History for Life", Anthony K. Jensen shows how 'timely' Nietzsche’s second "Untimely Meditation" really is. This comprehensive and insightful study contextualizes and analyzes a wide range of Nietzsche’s earlier thoughts about history: teleology, typology, psychology, memory, classical philology, Hegelianism, and the role historiography plays in modern culture. On the Uses and Disadvantage of History for Life is shown to be a ‘timely’ work, too, insofar as it weaves together a number of Nietzsche's most important influences and thematic directions at that time: ancient culture, science, epistemology, and the thought of Schopenhauer and Burckhardt. Rather than dismiss it as a mere ‘early’ work, Jensen shows how the text resonates in Nietzsche’s later perspectivism, his theory of subjectivity, and Eternal Recurrence. And by using careful philological analysis of the text’s composition history, Jensen is in position to fully elucidate and evaluate Nietzsche’s arguments in their proper contexts. As such Jensen’s Interpretation should restore Nietzsche’s second "Untimely Meditation" to a prominent place among 19th Century philosophies of history.

Author: Ken Gemes
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191662917
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 809

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Book Description
The diversity of Nietzsche's books, and the sheer range of his philosophical interests, have posed daunting challenges to his interpreters. This Oxford Handbook addresses this multiplicity by devoting each of its 32 essays to a focused topic, picked out by the book's systematic plan. The aim is to treat each topic at the best current level of philosophical scholarship on Nietzsche. The first group of papers treat selected biographical issues: his family relations, his relations to women, and his ill health and eventual insanity. In Part 2 the papers treat Nietzsche in historical context: his relations back to other philosophers—the Greeks, Kant, and Schopenhauer—and to the cultural movement of Romanticism, as well as his own later influence in an unlikely place, on analytic philosophy. The papers in Part 3 treat a variety of Nietzsche's works, from early to late and in styles ranging from the 'aphoristic' The Gay Science and Beyond Good and Evil through the poetic-mythic Thus Spoke Zarathustra to the florid autobiography Ecce Homo. This focus on individual works, their internal unity, and the way issues are handled within them, is an important complement to the final three groups of papers, which divide up Nietzsche's philosophical thought topically. The papers in Part 4 treat issues in Nietzsche's value theory, ranging from his metaethical views as to what values are, to his own values of freedom and the overman, to his insistence on 'order of rank', and his social-political views. The fifth group of papers treat Nietzsche's epistemology and metaphysics, including such well-known ideas as his perspectivism, his INSERT: Included in Starkmann 40% promotion, September-October 2014 being, and his thought of eternal recurrence. Finally, Part 6 treats another famous idea—the will to power—as well as two linked ideas that he uses will to power to explain, the drives, and life. This Handbook will be a key resource for all scholars and advanced students who work on Nietzsche.

Author: Simona Forti
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804792984
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 413

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The Italian philosopher and author of Totalitarianism “rescues the concept of evil as an element necessary for guidance in political reflection” (Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review). As long as we care about suffering in the world, says political philosopher Simona Forti, we are compelled to inquire into the question of evil. But is the concept of evil still useful in a postmodern landscape where absolute values have been leveled and relativized by a historicist perspective? Given our current unwillingness to judge others, what signposts remain to guide our ethical behavior? Surveying the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western philosophical debates on evil, Forti concludes that it is time to leave behind what she calls “the Dostoevsky paradigm”: the dualistic vision of an omnipotent monster pitted against absolute, helpless victims. No longer capable of grasping the normalization of evil in today’s world—whose structures of power have been transformed—this paradigm has exhausted its explanatory force. In its place, Forti offers a different genealogy of the relationship between evil and power, one that finally calls into question power’s recurrent link to transgression. At the center of contemporary evil she posits the passive attitude towards rule-following, the need for normalcy, and the desire for obedience nurtured by our contemporary mass democracies. In our times, she contends, evil must be explored in tandem with our stubborn desire to stay alive at all costs as much as with our deep need for recognition: the new modern absolutes. A courageous book, The New Demons extends an original, inspiring call to ethical living in a biopolitical age.

Author: Manuel Dries
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110246538
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
Nietzsche’s thought has been of renewed interest to philosophers in both the Anglo- American and the phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions. Nietzsche on Consciousness and the Embodied Mind presents 16 essays from analytic and continental perspectives. Appealing to both international communities of scholars, the volume seeks to deepen the appreciation of Nietzsche’s contribution to our understanding of consciousness and the mind. Over the past decades, a variety of disciplines have engaged with Nietzsche’s thought, including anthropology, biology, history, linguistics, neuroscience, and psychology, to name just a few. His rich and perspicacious treatment of consciousness, mind, and body cannot be reduced to any single discipline, and has the potential to speak to many. And, as several contributors make clear, Nietzsche’s investigations into consciousness and the embodied mind are integral to his wider ethical concerns. This volume contains contributions by international experts such as Christa Davis Acampora (Emory University), Keith Ansell-Pearson (Warwick University), João Constâncio (Universidade Nova de Lisboa), Frank Chouraqui (Leiden University), Manuel Dries (The Open University; Oxford University), Christian J. Emden (Rice University), Maria Cristina Fornari (University of Salento), Anthony K. Jensen (Providence College), Helmut Heit (Tongji University), Charlie Huenemann (Utah State University), Vanessa Lemm (Flinders University), Lawrence J. Hatab (Old Dominion University), Mattia Riccardi (University of Porto), Friedrich Ulfers and Mark Daniel Cohen (New York University and EGS), and Benedetta Zavatta (CNRS).

Author: Michael J. McNeal
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135034530X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
By re-examining Nietzsche's notion of the “eternal-feminine” and his views on women and feminism, this volume offers new perspectives on some of his key ideas. It brings together a diverse group of scholars to critically engage with Nietzsche's use of late-19th-century gender stereotypes and the ways in which they served his critique of values, including his use of “woman” as a trope for truth. Among other subjects, the contributors consider the role of psychology in Nietzsche's thought, his concern with style, self-creation, and advocacy of perfectionism, his views on romantic love and marriage, and his aim of revaluing all values to instigate a distant philosophy of the future. They investigate parallels between Nietzsche's thought and Shaktism, his relation to Goethe and Stendahl, and his influence on Beauvoir, Butler, and Dohm. With the inclusion of two seminal essays on Nietzsche and women by Lawrence J. Hatab and Kelly Oliver, the volume also illustrates some of the ways in which scholarship on these subjects has evolved over the last four decades. Providing fresh insights into these inter-related subjects, Nietzsche on Women and the Eternal-Feminine highlights the enduring relevance of his thought and its still-underappreciated potential for re-thinking both the bases for and aims of feminism and other emancipatory movements.

Author: Paolo D'Iorio
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022628865X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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“When for the first time I saw the evening rise with its red and gray softened in the Naples sky,” Nietzsche wrote, “it was like a shiver, as though pitying myself for starting my life by being old, and the tears came to me and the feeling of having been saved at the very last second.” Few would guess it from the author of such cheery works as The Birth of Tragedy, but as Paolo D’Iorio vividly recounts in this book, Nietzsche was enraptured by the warmth and sun of southern Europe. It was in Sorrento that Nietzsche finally matured as a thinker. Nietzsche first voyaged to the south in the autumn of 1876, upon the invitation of his friend, Malwida von Meysenbug. The trip was an immediate success, reviving Nietzsche’s joyful and trusting sociability and fertilizing his creative spirit. Walking up and down the winding pathways of Sorrento and drawing on Nietzsche’s personal notebooks, D’Iorio tells the compelling story of Nietzsche’s metamorphosis beneath the Italian skies. It was here, D’Iorio shows, that Nietzsche broke intellectually with Wagner, where he decided to leave his post at Bâle, and where he drafted his first work of aphorisms, Human, All Too Human, which ushered in his mature era. A sun-soaked account of a philosopher with a notoriously overcast disposition, this book is a surprising travelogue through southern Italy and the history of philosophy alike.

Author: João Constâncio
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110408201
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 728

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Nietzsche's critique of the modern subject is often presented as a radical break with modern philosophy and associated with the so-called ‘death of the subject’ in 20th century philosophy. But Nietzsche claimed to be a ‘psychologist’ who was trying to open up the path for ‘new versions and sophistications of the soul hypothesis.’ Although there is no doubt that Nietzsche gave expression to a fundamental crisis of the modern conception of subjectivity (both from a theoretical and from a practical-existential perspective), it is open to debate whether he wanted to abandon the very idea of subjectivity or only to pose the problem of subjectivity in new terms. The volume includes 26 articles by top Nietzsche scholars. The chapters in Part I, “Tradition and Context”, deal with the relationship between Nietzsche's views on subjectivity and modern philosophy, as well as with the late 19th century context in which his thought emerged; Part II, “The Crisis of the Subject”, examines the impact of Nietzsche's critique of the subject on 20th century philosophy, from Freud to Heidegger to Dennett, but also in such authors as Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, or Luhmann; Part III, “Current Debates - From Embodiment and Consciousness to Agency”, shows that the way in which Nietzsche engaged with such themes as the self, agency, consciousness, embodiment and self-knowledge makes his thought highly relevant for philosophy today, especially for philosophy of mind and ethics.

Author: Anthony K. Jensen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107244889
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
Nietzsche, the so-called herald of the 'philosophy of the future', nevertheless dealt with the past on nearly every page of his writing. Not only was he concerned with how past values, cultural practices and institutions influence the present - he was plainly aware that any attempt to understand that influence encounters many meta-historical problems. This comprehensive and lucid exposition of the development of Nietzsche's philosophy of history explores how Nietzsche thought about history and historiography throughout his life and how it affected his most fundamental ideas. Discussion of the whole span of Nietzsche's writings, from his earliest publications as a classical philologist to his later genealogical and autobiographical projects, is interwoven with careful analysis of his own forms of writing history, the nineteenth-century paradigms which he critiqued, and the twentieth-century views which he anticipated. The book will be of much interest to scholars of Nietzsche and of nineteenth-century philosophy.

Author: Mattia Riccardi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198803281
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
In Nietzsche's Philosophical Psychology, Mattia Riccardi offers a systematic account of Nietzsche's thought on the human mind. A central theme is the nature of and relation between the unconscious and conscious mind. Whereas Nietzsche takes consciousness to be a mere surface--as he writes in Ecce Homo--that evolved in the course of human socialisation, he sees the bedrock of human psychology as constituted by unconscious drives and affects. But how does he conceive of such basic psychological items and what does he mean exactly when he talks about consciousness and says it is a surface? And how does such a conception of human psychology inform his views about self, self-knowledge and will? Riccardi addresses these and related questions by combining historical accuracy with conceptual analysis: Nietzsche's claims are carefully reconstructed by taking into account the intellectual context in which they emerged; in order to work out their philosophical significance, Riccardi discusses them in the light of contemporary debates such as those about higher-order theories of consciousness and mind-reading.

Author: Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402051921
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 463

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Book Description
Transcendental phenomenology presumed to have overcome the classic mind-body dichotomy in terms of consciousness. Should we indeed dissolve the specificity of human consciousness by explaining human experience in its multiple sense-giving modalities through the physiological functions of the brain? The present collection of studies addresses this crucial question challenging such "naturalizing" reductionism from multiple angles.