Matthew Meyer

This essay seeks to overcome the divide that has emerged in recent scholarship between Alexander Nehamas’s reading of Nietzsche as an aestheticist who eschews the dogmatism implicit in the scientific project and Brian Leiter's reading of Nietzsche as a hard-nosed naturalist whose project is continuous with the natural sciences. It is argued that Nietzsche turns to the natural sciences to justify a relationalist ontology that not only eliminates metaphysical concepts such as ‘being’ and ‘things-in-themselves’, but also can be linked to key components of the aestheticist reading. As a result, Nietzsche's naturalism should not be understood as opposing important features of his aestheticism. Instead, Nietzsche's project should be understood in terms of a naturalized aestheticism that rejects the metaphysical-moral interpretation of existence espoused by philosophers such as Plato, Kant, and Schopenhauer

For many years, Anglo-American scholars paid scant attention to Nietzsche’s published works as integral wholes. Explicitly or implicitly, scholars agreed with Arthur Danto that Nietzsche’s texts had little order and coherence and so the interpreter’s task was to systematize Nietzsche’s philosophy for him by assembling ideas found throughout his corpus.1 Recently, however, there has been a significant increase in scholarship focused on Nietzsche’s published works. Not only have a number of readings of On the Genealogy of Morals been produced in the past decade,2 scholars have recently published works devoted exclusively to texts such as The Birth of Tragedy,3 Human, All Too Human,4 and The Gay Science.5 Christa ..

Michael Ure’s introduction to Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Gay Science is a welcome contribution to the secondary literature. He provides a clear and coherent account of this complex text and situates his interpretation within Nietzsche’s larger oeuvre and philosophical project. Ure advances an original thesis—GS is Nietzsche’s attempt to revive an ancient understanding of philosophy as a way of life—that will be of interest to scholars more generally, and yet he still succeeds in introducing the text to the novice reader. Although I identify some points of disagreement below, Ure has nevertheless written the best introduction to GS currently available in the English language.The structure of Ure’s text largely...

Recent Anglophone scholarship has successfully shown that Nietzsche's thought makes important contributions to a wide range of contemporary philosophical debates. In so doing, however, scholarship has lost sight of another important feature of Nietzsche's project, namely his desire to challenge the very conception of philosophy that has been used to assess his merits as a philosopher. In other words, contemporary scholarship has overlooked Nietzsche's contributions to metaphilosophy, i.e. debates around the nature, methods, and aims of philosophy. This important new collection of essays brings together an international group of distinguished scholars to explore and discuss these contributions and debates. It will appeal to anyone interested in metaphilosophy, Nietzsche studies, German studies, or intellectual history.

In recent years, a divide has emerged in Anglo-American scholarship between Alexander Nehamas’ reading of Nietzsche as an aestheticist who eschews the dogmatism implicit in the scientific project and Brian Leiter’s reading of Nietzsche as a hardnosed naturalist whose project is continuous with work in the natural sciences. In this paper, I argue that this divide is a false one. This is because Nietzsche thinks that a certain worldview, which he associates with the philosophy of Heraclitus, is conducive to the flourishing of art, and rather than avoiding the dangers of dogmatism in presenting this view, he turns to the natural sciences to show why everyone should accept it. As a result, the crucial divide in Nietzsche’s thinking is not between naturalism and aestheticism and so science and art, but between the naturalism and aestheticism that flourished during what Nietzsche calls the tragic age of the Greeks and the metaphysics and morality characteristic of the Platonic-Christian tradition.

This is an important volume on a topic that has gained increasing traction in recent Nietzsche scholarship. In it, fourteen authors—trained philosophers and Germanists—discuss the related themes of contest, conflict, war, and the Greek agon in Nietzsche's works. Although the quality of the contributions varies, there are enough substantive essays in the volume to ensure that it will be essential reading for subsequent studies on the subject.In the introduction, the editors claim that although Nietzsche's reflections on fundamental ontology are distinct from his interest in cultural institutions such as the Greek agon, they nevertheless provide important "background assumptions" for thinking about cultural...

Between 1878 and 1882, Nietzsche published what he called 'the free spirit works': Human, All Too Human; Assorted Opinions and Maxims; The Wanderer and His Shadow; Daybreak; and The Gay Science. Often approached as a mere assemblage of loosely connected aphorisms, these works are here reinterpreted as a coherent narrative of the steps Nietzsche takes in educating himself toward freedom that that executes a dialectic between scientific truth-seeking and artistic life-affirmation. Matthew Meyer's new reading of these works not only provides a more convincing explanation of their content but also makes better sense of the relationship between them and Nietzsche's larger oeuvre. His argument shows how these texts can and should be read as a unified project even while they present multiple, in some cases conflicting, images of the free spirit. The book will appeal to anyone who is interested in Nietzsche's philosophy and especially to those puzzled about how to understand the peculiarities of the free spirit works.