This book brings together five of Nietzsche’s early writings, all driven by a powerful reaction against modern ideas of truth, equality, and progress. In Homer’s Contest and The Greek State, Nietzsche argues that culture and the state were not born from reason or justice, but from struggle, domination, and noble rivalry. On Theognis of Megara mourns the downfall of an older moral order, where the best men ruled and virtue was tied to lineage and strength. On Truth and Falsity in their Ultramoral Sense challenges the belief in objective truth, showing how language and knowledge are shaped by power and need, not by reality. At the centre, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks presents the first philosophers not as quiet thinkers, but as bold, tragic figures confronting a chaotic world. Together, these works reject the democratic and rationalist assumptions of modernity, offering instead a vision rooted in hierarchy, myth, and heroic conflict.
Author
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (Ph.D., Philology, Leipzig University, 1869) was a German philosopher of the late 19th century who challenged the foundations of Christianity and traditional morality. He was interested in the enhancement of individual and cultural health, and believed in life, creativity, power, and the realities of the world we live in, rather than those situated in a world beyond. Central to his philosophy is the idea of “life-affirmation,” which involves a questioning of all doctrines that drain life's expansive energies, however socially prevalent those views might be. Often referred to as one of the first existentialist philosophers along with Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855). From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
