Peter Poellner

The last decade has seen a very considerable revival of interest in Nietzsche. However, many of the studies available in English fail to do justice to the complexity of his writings and tend to involve only very partial and limited readings of his work. This book offers a new and comprehensive interpretation and a detailed critical assessment of Nietzsche's later ideas on epistemology and metaphysics, drawing extensively not only on his published works but also his voluminous notebooks, largely unpublished in English. The author examines Nietzsche's various distinct lines of thought on the traditionally central areas of philosophy and shows in what specific sense Nietzsche, as he himself claimed, might be said to have moved beyond these questions. Throughout the book, considerable attention is paid both to the historical context of his writings and to subsequent developments in philosophy--English-language as well as Continental European. Among the themes discussed are Nietzsche's relation to scepticism and to evolutionary epistemology; his analysis of `objective reality' and the associated `perspectivism'; his criticism of the metaphysician's `will to truth' and the related analysis of the intellectual paradigm he called the `ascetic ideal'; and his notion of unconscious mental states; and the concept of the will to power and its relation to metaphysics. Dr Peollner, while recognizing the originality of Nietzsche's influential new philosophical paradigm, shows that his thought has closer affinities to the orthodox philosophical tradition than is generally supposed.

Nietzsche and Metaphysics

Peter Poellner offers a comprehensive interpretation and a detailed critical assessment of Nietzsche's later ideas on epistemology and metaphysics, drawing on his published works and his largely unpublished voluminous notebooks.

Michael Bell

The contributors to this collection of essays on the literary use of myth in the early twentieth century and its literary and philosophical precedents from romanticism onwards draw on a range of disciplines, from anthropology, comparative literature, and literary criticism, to philosophy and religious studies. The underlying assumption is that modernist myth-making does not retreat from modernity, but projects a mode of being for the future which the past could serve to define. Modernist myth is not an attempted recovery of an archaic form of life so much as a sophisticated self-conscious equivalent. Far from seeking a return to an earlier romantic valorizing of myth, these essays show how the true interest of early twentieth-century myth-making lies in the consciousness, affirmative as well as tragic, of living in a human world which, in so far as it must embody value, can have no ultimate grounding. Although myth may initially appear to be the archaic counterterm to modernity, it is thus also the paradigm on which modernity has repeatedly reconstructed, or come to understand, its own life forms. The very term myth, by combining, in its modern usage, the rival meanings of a grounding narrative and a falsehood, encapsulates a central problem of modernity: how to live, given what we know.

Peter Poellner

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