Helmut Heit

Ausgehend von einer Skizze seiner gesundheitlichen Situation präsentiert dieser Aufsatz Nietzsches Aufgabe seiner Professur und seiner Baseler Existenz als biographischen Hintergrund eines salutogenetischen Konzepts von Genesung als Form der Loslösung. Während der berühmte Zusammenbruch von 1889 für Nietzsches Rezeption relevant, aber für sein Denken bedeutungslos war, ermöglicht der Blick auf seine Entscheidung von 1879 ein differenzierteres Verständnis seiner psychologisierenden entlarvenden Hermeneutik. Sie korrespondiert mit Nietzsches Physio-Psychologie des Leibes. Davon ausgehend werden auch die stimulierenden Dimensionen von Krankheit und die Pluralität möglicher Gesundheiten verständlich. Weit entfernt von soldatischer Strenge und kriegerischer Ignoranz, beruht Nietzsches Weg zur Gesundheit auf Achtsamkeit, Sorge und Praxis.

Fragt man heute Vertreter verschiedener Disziplinen nach der Bedeutung des Hannoveraner Universalgelehrten Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, so hort man jeweils immer wieder: Leibniz hat Bedeutendes fur unser Fach geleistet. Leibniz beeindruckt nicht nur durch die Exzellenz seiner Leistung, sondern auch durch die Breite seiner Betatigungsfelder. Der aus einer Ringvorlesung an der Leibniz Universitat Hannover hervorgegangene Band fuhrt nun an die Vielfalt der von Leibniz ausgehenden der Leistungen und Anregungen heran. Insbesondere behandeln die Beitrage die Bedeutung von Leibniz fur die Geschichtswissenschaft, die Theologie, die Philosophie, die Rechtswissenschaft und Juristerei, die Politikberatung, das Versicherungswesen, die Mathematik, die Ingenieurwissenschaften und die Sprachwissenschaft. Abgerundet wird der Band durch eine Einfuhrung von Werner Eisner und eine biographische Skizze aus der Feder von Eike Christian Hirsch.

Source-Genetics as Positive Science? Advantages and Disadvantages in Dealing with Nietzsche’s Personal Library. Nietzsche’s personal library attracts ever increasing interest and proves to be a fruitful resource of research in his intellectual contexts and developments. This paper exemplarily discusses the advantages and disadvantages of reconstructive research in Nietzsche’s personal library on the basis of his reading of Maximilian Drossbach. His On the apparent and the real causes of events in the world (1884) belongs to the most heavily annotated works in Nietzsche’s estate. My discussion focuses on two topics: ‘causality’ and ‘will to power’. Regarding both topics interesting parallels and similarities, as well as various significant differences and demarcations are extremely helpful to enrich our understanding of Nietzsche. But the engagement with Drossbach also reveals that reading is an active and essentially non-transparent process of intertextual adoption, incorporation and transformation. Finally, I turn to the methodological implications and obstacles of this finding for working with personal libraries such as Nietzsche’s.

ABSTRACT In this article, I investigate the reception of Richard Schacht's Nietzsche in Germany. Despite the fact that his later work was widely acknowledged in Germany, his 1983 monograph did not receive much attention. I suggest that this is due in part to the significantly differing landscapes in the United States and in Germany during the 1980s and in part to different methodological approaches. Schacht's incentive to introduce Nietzsche to an analytically minded and generally quite hostile American audience by means of extracting his arguments, not the least through extensive use of The Will to Power, did not contribute much to the contemporary focus of the founders of Nietzsche-Studien, who aimed to establish a professionalized reconstructive Nietzsche-research based on the critical edition of Colli and Montinari. However, in my concluding remarks I argue that Schacht's balancing approach and his notion of discourse-relative truth might serve intercontinental dispute about Nietzsche better than some currently more striking alternatives.

This paper argues that Protagoras’ concept of education, unlike the Platonic ideal of complete transmission of cognitive knowledge, is not oriented towards the paradigm of axiomatic geometry, but seeks to develop virtue and judgment through processes of consideration, insight, imitation, and practice. Accordingly, his epistemology combines consciousness of moderate relativity with a preference for proliferation of theories, without giving up the claim to gradually better logoi. Protagoras’ position can thus be understood and defended against the reservations of Plato to Boghossian as a systematically attractive and virtuous epistemic attitude.

Typically, the first decade of Friedrich Nietzsche's career is considered a sort of précis to his mature thinking. Yet his philological articles, lectures, and notebooks on Ancient Greek culture and thought - much of which has received insufficient scholarly attention - were never intended to serve as a preparatory ground to future thought. Nietzsche's early scholarship was intended to express his insights into the character of antiquity. Many of those insights are not only important for better understanding Nietzsche; they remain vital for understanding antiquity today. Interdisciplinary in scope and international in perspective, this volume investigates Nietzsche as a scholar of antiquity, offering the first thorough examination of his articles, lectures, notebooks on Ancient Greek culture and thought in English. With eleven original chapters by some of the leading Nietzsche scholars and classicists from around the world and with reproductions of two definitive essays, this book analyzes Nietzsche's scholarly methods and aims, his understanding of antiquity, and his influence on the history of classical studies.

Nietzsche, Luther, and the Story of Jesus of Nazareth: Heinrich Detering in Conversation with Andreas Urs Sommer. In this talk given in Naumburg on October 13, 2017, Heinrich Detering and Andreas Urs Sommer consider late Nietzsche’s conflictual remarks on Jesus and Luther from Der Antichrist, Ecce homo, and his final letters to be literarily alienated signs of Jesuanic identification. In order to reveal these artistic cover-up tactics, Detering and Sommer follow Nietzsche’s path from proclaiming the death of God in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft in 1882 to him taking God’s place as the Christ on the cross in early 1889.

O título deste paper conecta duas palavras, frequentemente aplicadas ao pensamento de Nietzsche, mas usualmente não de forma simultânea, dado que perspectivismo e naturalismo são frequentemente vistos como conceitos alternativos, ou mesmo contraditórios. Enquanto perspectivismo é associado a leituras estéticas, construtivistas, kantianas e mesmo relativistas e pós-modernas de Nietzsche, a noção de naturalismo o aproxima da ciência, do empirismo e do realismo. Por esta razão, muitos dos que atribuem a Nietzsche versões de perspectivismo abrigam reservas com relação a leituras naturalistas e vice versa. Esse paper, todavia, argumenta que Nietzsche não defende ou desenvolve abertamente ‘naturalismo’ ou ‘perspectivismo’ na forma de doutrinas ou teorias. Devemos ser relutantes em aplicar denominadores, aparentemente tão estreitos a sua filosofia, haja vista poderem muito bem ser, fundamentalmente, enganadores. Ademais, tais abordagens tendem a resultar em preconceitos confirmados ao invés de novas ideias. Então, com relação a questão de se Nietzsche deve ser chamado de um ‘naturalista’, me parece que a maldade [evil] tem peso consideravelmente maior do que a necessidade, nesse caso. Nietzsche não ensina doutrinas mas exemplifica, testa e propõe certas práticas filosóficas, sendo que essas sim contêm características naturalistas e perspectivísticas. Ele convida o seu leitor a adotar perspectivas naturalistas e as explora experimentalmente nos seus respectivos contextos práticos a fim de perseguir um dado projeto. As abordagens naturalizantes de Nietzsche da mente, filosofia e ciência, seu aparente empirismo, sensualismo e materialismo são sempre contrapesados por uma epistemologia crítica.

The aim of this paper is to point out significant similarities and productive dissonances between Marx and Nietzsche. My thesis is that these two thinkers have much more in common as is usually acknowledged. After a prove that Nietzsche most certainly know Marx, I develop several aspects of commonality. Both pursue philosophical projects of critical transformation, employ a hermeneutics of suspicion beyond good and evil, propose a naturalized anthropology and historical reconstructions. The final passages discuss their respective views on capitalism and socialism. The similarities as well as the differences between Marx and Nietzsche could serve as a productive resource and inspiration in our contemporary attempts to understand the world we live in.

RESUMO Neste artigo argumento que Nietzsche desenvolve a ideia de uma gaia ciência, que afirma a vida, como um possível resultado de uma história cultural do ascetismo e da sublimação. As seções finais da "Genealogia da moral" introduzem uma distinção entre ciência normal e idealista e discutem suas respectivas relações com o ascetismo. A prática do trabalho científico normal e a busca idealista pela verdade revelam, ambas, a falta de ideais autônomos. Uma análise de sua compreensão do conhecimento hipotética e instrumentalista mostra que a discussão nietzscheana da verdade não é autorrrefutável. Nietzsche não é um inimigo da ciência, mas afirma uma posição privilegiada para a filosofia na hierarquia das disciplinas em um amplo contexto de emancipação cultural. ABSTRACT This paper argues that Nietzsche develops the idea of a life-affirming, joyful science as a possible result of a cultural history of ascetism and sublimation. The closing sections of "On the Genealogy of Morals" introduce a distinction between normal and idealist science and discuss their respective relation to ascetism. The practice of normal scientific labour and the idealist quest for truth both reveal the lack of autonomous ideals. An analysis of his hypothetical and instrumentalist understanding of knowledge-claims shows that Nietzsche's discussion of truth is not self-refuting. Nietzsche is no enemy of science but assumes a privileged position for philosophy in the hierarchy of disciplines within a broader context of cultural emancipation.

Globalisation seems to be especially the Westernisation of the World. One of the crucial elements of (Western) European cultural identity is the reference to its scientific and philosophical inheritance. European culture is held to be rooted in ancient Greece, where a unique, historically inevitable and irreversible transition from myth to reason is thought to have taken place. I shall try to re-examine this still predominant view to clarify the elements of Western thought by comparing it with its historical predecessors in ancient Greek mythology in order to discuss its Euro-centric elements. For this purpose, two questions have to be asked: What is so special about ancient Greek philosophy? And how and why did it come into being? The arguments given to solve the first question are hardly convincing. If we might not be able to give a satisfying answer, the search for the reasons to come up with something like Western philosophy are becoming more important.

Ever since Aristotle cryptically mentioned the λεγοµέυοις ἀγράφοις δόγµασιυ (Physics 209b) and proposed they differ significantly from the explicit statements in the published Platonic dialogues, these so-called unwritten doctrines were objects of speculation. Given Plato’s notorious distrust in unprepared readers and the uncontrollable vulnerability of published writings to all kinds of misunderstandings, the existence of esoteric teachings seems plausible. Like his most prominent ancient counterpart, Nietzsche displays severe reservations against hasty readers, too, and his usage of literary devices and all kinds of masks, as well as his explicit advice to a “reader, how I deserve him” (EH “Books” 5), indicate ..

This paper argues that a particular philosophical and historical understanding of Ancient Greek thought is used to establish a superior Western identity of universal prevalence. Starting with the terminological differences between ethnocentrism and Eurocentrism, I then reconstruct the rise of Eurocentrism by examining the changing conceptualizations of Greeks and Barbarians in Ancient texts from Homer to Aristotle. The third section explores how Western historians of philosophy and culture have used this Greek self-understanding to legitimate the view of Western cultural superiority based on universalism. Finally, I discuss several possibilities to counter this form of Eurocentric Western identity-politics