A new edition of this important work of Nietzsche's 'mature' philosophy.

A comprehensive and unusual introduction to Nietzsche, providing a separate introductory essay for each of his major works.

While much attention has been lavished on Friedrich Nietzsche’s earlier and later works, those of his so-called middle period have been generally neglected, perhaps because of their aphoristic style or perhaps because they are perceived to be inconsistent with the rest of his thought. With Nietzsche’s Enlightenment, Paul Franco gives this crucial section of Nietzsche’s oeuvre its due, offering a thoughtful analysis of the three works that make up the philosopher’s middle period: Human, All too Human; Daybreak; and The Gay Science. It is Nietzsche himself who suggests that these works are connected, saying that their “common goal is to erect a new image and ideal of the free spirit.” Franco argues that in their more favorable attitude toward reason, science, and the Enlightenment, these works mark a sharp departure from Nietzsche’s earlier, more romantic writings and differ in important ways from his later, more prophetic writings, beginning with Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The Nietzsche these works reveal is radically different from the popular image of him and even from the Nietzsche depicted in much of the secondary literature; they reveal a rational Nietzsche, one who preaches moderation instead of passionate excess and Dionysian frenzy. Franco concludes with a wide-ranging examination of Nietzsche’s later works, tracking not only how his outlook changes from the middle period to the later but also how his commitment to reason and intellectual honesty in his middle works continues to inform his final writings.

Abbey presents a close study of Nietzsche's works Human, All Too Human; Daybreak; and The Gay Science. Although these middle period works tend to be neglected in commentaries on Nietzsche, they repay close attention. Abbey's study of Nietzsche's middle period paints a vastly different portrait of the philosopher: a careful, sensitive analyst of moral life. This work fills a serious gap in the literature on Nietzsche.

When careful consideration is given to Nietzsche's critique of Platonism and to what he wrote about Bismarck, Kaiser Wilhelm, and to Germany's place in "international relations" (die Gro e Politik), the philosopher's carefully cultivated "pose of untimeliness" is revealed to be an imposture. As William H. F. Altman demonstrates, Nietzsche should be recognized as the paradigmatic philosopher of the Second Reich, the short-lived and equally complex German Empire that vanished in World War One. Since Nietzsche is a brilliant stylist whose seemingly disconnected aphorisms have made him notoriously difficult for scholars to analyze, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche is presented in Nietzsche's own style in a series of 155 brief sections arranged in five discrete "Books," a structure modeled on Daybreak. All of Nietzsche's books are considered in the context of the close and revealing relationship between "Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche" (named by his patriotic father after the King of Prussia) and the Second Reich. In "Preface to 'A German Trilogy, '" Altman joins this book to two others already published by Lexington Books: Martin Heidegger and the First World War: Being and Time as Funeral Oration and The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National Socialism.

Paying particular attention to the issue of how to read Nietzsche, this book presents a series of accessible essays on the work of this influential German philosopher. The contributions include many of the leading Nietzsche scholars in the United States today - Frithjof Bergmann, Arthur Danto, Bernd Magnus, Christopher Middleton, Lars Gustaffson, Alexander Nehamas, Richard Schacht, Gary Shapiro, and Ivan Soll - and the majority of the essays have never been published. Works discussed include On the Genealogy of Morals, Beyond Good and Evil, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Twilight of the Idols, and The Will to Power.