Nietzsche

Twilight of the Idols presents a vivid, compressed overview of many of Nietzsche’s mature ideas, including his attack on Plato’s Socrates and on the Platonic legacy in Western philosophy and culture. Polt provides a trustworthy rendering of Nietzsche’s text in contemporary American English, complete with notes prepared by the translator and Tracy Strong. An authoritative Introduction by Strong makes this an outstanding edition.

The reference to the Antichrist is not intended to refer to the biblical Antichrist but is rather an attack on the "slave morality" and apathy of Western Christianity. Nietzsche's basic claim is that Christianity is a poisoner of western culture and perversion of the words of and practice of Jesus. Throughout the text, Nietzsche is very critical of institutionalized religion and its priest class, from which he himself was descended. The majority of the book is a systematic attack upon the interpretations of Christ's words by St. Paul and those who followed him. Nietzsche claimed in the Foreword to have written the book for a very limited readership. In order to understand the book, he asserted that the reader "... must be honest in intellectual matters to the point of hardness to so much as endure my seriousness, my passion." The reader should be above politics and nationalism. Also, the usefulness or harmfulness of truth should not be a concern. Characteristics such as "Strength which prefers questions for which no one today is sufficiently daring; courage for the forbidden" are also needed. He disdained all other readers.

This volume presents Nietzsche's remarkable collection of almost 1400 aphorisms in R. J. Hollingdale's distinguished translation, together with a new historical introduction by Richard Schacht. Subtitled "A Book for Free Spirits," Human, All Too Human marked for Nietzsche a new "positivism" and skepticism with which he challenged his previous metaphysical and psychological assumptions. Nearly all the themes of his later work are displayed here with characteristic perceptiveness and honesty—not to say suspicion and irony—in language of great brio. It remains one of the fundamental works for an understanding of his thought.

本书是尼采的重要作品之一。《朝霞》1881年问世，1887年新版并附有一篇前言，它在著作史上位于《人性的，太人性的》第二部分（1880）与《快乐的科学》（1882）之间。《朝霞》分为五卷，每卷分为长短不同的节，少只有一两行，多则一两页，甚至偶尔长达三页以上。该书比较详细的部分，特别是前三卷，有点像随笔式的短文，其思想素描与其说是巨细无遗的不如说是钩玄提要的。在接下来的讨论中，特别是在第四卷中，每段要更短一些，带有圣经经文的思想风格。寥寥几个句子甚至单独一个句子构成浓缩的和凝练的格言，好像压缩甚至过度压缩的短文。

"[This book] mirrors all of Nietzsche's thought and could be related in hundreds of ways to his other books, his notes, and his letters. And yet it is complete in itself. For it is a work of art." —Walter Kaufmann in the Introduction Nietzsche called The Gay Science "the most personal of all my books." It was here that he first proclaimed the death of God—to which a large part of the book is devoted—and his doctrine of the eternal recurrence. Walter Kaufmann's commentary, with its many quotations from previously untranslated letters, brings to life Nietzsche as a human being and illuminates his philosophy. The book contains some of Nietzsche's most sustained discussions of art and morality, knowledge and truth, the intellectual conscience and the origin of logic. Most of the book was written just before Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the last part five years later, after Beyond Good and Evil. We encounter Zarathustra in these pages as well as many of Nietzsche's most interesting philosophical ideas and the largest collection of his own poetry that he himself ever published. Walter Kaufmann's English versions of Nietzsche represent one of the major translation enterprises of our time. He is the first philosopher to have translated Nietzsche's major works, and never before has a single translator given us so much of Nietzsche.

Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil is translated from the German by R.J. Hollingdale with an introduction by Michael Tanner in Penguin Classics. Beyond Good and Evil confirmed Nietzsche's position as the towering European philosopher of his age. The work dramatically rejects the tradition of Western thought with its notions of truth and God, good and evil. Nietzsche demonstrates that the Christian world is steeped in a false piety and infected with a 'slave morality'. With wit and energy, he turns from this critique to a philosophy that celebrates the present and demands that the individual imposes their own 'will to power' upon the world. This edition includes a commentary on the text by the translator and Michael Tanner's introduction, which explains some of the more abstract passages in Beyond Good and Evil. Frederich Nietzsche (1844-1900) became the chair of classical philology at Basel University at the age of 24 until his bad health forced him to retire in 1879. He divorced himself from society until his final collapse in 1899 when he became insane. A powerfully original thinker, Nietzsche's influence on subsequent writers, such as George Bernard Shaw, D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann and Jean-Paul Sartre, was considerable. If you enjoyed Beyond Good and Evil you might like Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, also available in Penguin Classics. "One of the greatest books of a very great thinker." —Michael Tanner

On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) is a book about the history of ethics and about interpretation. Nietzsche rewrites the former as a history of cruelty, exposing the central values of the Judaeo-Christian and liberal traditions - compassion, equality, justice - as the product of a brutal process of conditioning designed to domesticate the animal vitality of earlier cultures. The result is a book which raises profoundly disquieting issues about the violence of both ethics and interpretation. Nietzsche questions moral certainties by showing that religion and science have no claim to absolute truth, before turning on his own arguments in order to call their very presuppositions into question. The Genealogy is the most sustained of Nietzsche's later works and offers one of the fullest expressions of his characteristic concerns. This edition places his ideas within the cultural context of his own time and stresses the relevance of his work for a contemporary audience.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a foundational work of Western literature and is widely considered to be Friedrich Nietzsche’s masterpiece. It includes the German philosopher’s famous discussion of the phrase ‘God is dead’ as well as his concept of the Superman. Nietzsche delineates his Will to Power theory and devotes pages to critiquing Christian thinking, in particular Christianity’s definition of good and evil.

In late 1888, only weeks before his final collapse into madness, Nietzsche (1844-1900) set out to compose his autobiography, and Ecce Homo remains one of the most intriguing yet bizarre examples of the genre ever written. In this extraordinary work Nietzsche traces his life, work and development as a philosopher, examines the heroes he has identified with, struggled against and then overcome - Schopenhauer, Wagner, Socrates, Christ - and predicts the cataclysmic impact of his 'forthcoming revelation of all values'. Both self-celebrating and self-mocking, penetrating and strange, Ecce Homo gives the final, definitive expression to Nietzsche's main beliefs and is in every way his last testament.