Jordan Rodgers

The works of Nietzsche's middle period tend to be neglected by Nietzsche scholars. Already, Michael Ure's first book, Nietzsche's Therapy was a welcome exception, and he continues his exploration in this new book, a study of the work Nietzsche called his most personal, The Gay Science.Nietzsche is right to call GS personal, and Ure is right to emphasize it. Its preface explains that Nietzsche wrote the text while recovering from long illness, and many of the first edition's 342 aphorisms allude to his personal experiences. Calling it a "philosophical autobiography", as Ure does, is perhaps an overstatement. Nietzsche wrote one of those—Ecce Homo—and wild as that book is...

Polytheism is a strange view to hold in modernity. Connected as it is in the popular imagination with archaic, animistic, magical, prescientific systems of thought, we don’t hesitate much before casting it into the dustbin of history. Even if we are not monotheists, we are likely to think of monotheism as the obviously more plausible position. The traditional arguments for the existence of God, which have been enormously influential in Western philosophy of religion, do not necessarily rule out polytheism but they are clearly formulated with monotheism in mind. While there could be multiple first causes, intelligent designers, or beings than which nothing greater can be conceived, the simplest and most natural...