In his article "Nietzsche and the Knowledge of the Child at Play: On the Question of Metaphysics" Johannes Welfing raises the question of a Nietzschean metaphysical presence (did Nietzsche define the essence of life and of being and thus also implicitly establish an imperative about the way in which one should lead one's life, or did he refrain from all definition, truth, system or law whatsoev...

Culture remains a divisive issue in liberal democracies, and this article argues Nietzsche offers a principled middle ground between the conservative and progressive camps of recent and ongoing ‘culture wars’. Hence, this article challenges the ‘aristocratic’ versus ‘democratic’ Nietzsche debate by making the case that Nietzsche defended two opposed notions of culture in his early period work: ...

At first glance, a comparison between Nietzsche and Aristotle may seem improbable. If Nietzsche is indeed a moral relativist, as is often suggested, why is Nietzsche concerned with the development of human character? There are explicit instances of Nietzsche assessing the positive and negative, beneficial and injurious, traits of human character. In “What is Noble” of Beyond Good and Evil, Niet...

The ‚Nietzsche-Thesaurus’ ist part of an Internet-Portal to the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (under construction). By using the complex Index of a Citation Lexicon (print version) and combining it with the lexikal data and structure of the ‘Deutscher Wortschatz’ (Wehrle/Eggers, a kind of transformation of the Roget’s Thesaurus), a relational access system is developed. Concept and Sta...

Moral philosophers like Martha Nussbaum, Philippa Foot, and Michael Weber argue for what I call the “Neo-Stoic Reading” of Nietzsche, which includes two claims: first, Nietzsche allegedly recommends the relentless pursuit of self-interest at the expense of other persons; second, he denies empathy any major role in the ethical life. I will argue that the Neo-Stoic view misses an important unifyi...

Considered one of the most formidable and enigmatic philosophers of all time, Friedrich Nietzsche captivates his readers by weaving charismatic aphorisms of logic and emotion. Many claim his enticing presentations are too “dynamite,” focused only on the destruction of society. Disdainful of the crumbling state of his homeland, Nietzsche observes the cause of Europe’s ruins and devotes himself t...

Although Michel Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche is involved in the reasoning of this essay, this paper does not deal with the topics most philosophers focus their attention on when they praise or severely criticize Foucault’s so-called “Nietzscheanism.” As a matter of fact, Foucault made rather scholarly use of Nietzsche. By “scholarly” I mean that he did not celebrate à la française, the famou...

One of the very few matters of nearly universal agreement with respect to Nietzsche interpretation, one that bridges the great analytic/continental divide, is that Nietzsche was offering some sort of account of freedom, in contradistinction to the ‘ascetic’ or ‘slavish’ ways of the past. What remains in dispute is the character of this account. In this paper I present Nietzsche’s account of fre...

Both Nietzsche, as the nineteenth century wound down, and Foucault in the last third of the twentieth century, responded to, and sought a way out of, a profound cultural crisis. Nietzsche first signaled the eruption of that crisis with his proclamation of the death of God,1 and eighty years later Foucault confronted the deepening impact of that same crisis. For Nietzsche, the death of God, in t...