The central theme of this collection of essays, first published in 1978, is the basic tension in Nietzsche, and so in his work, between the urge to weave a satisfying web out of reality and the equally strong compulsion to expose its painful truths. The book aims to stress, not to play down, the embarassing and fruitful fact that he cannot be neatly pigeonholed either as a literary figure or as a professional philosopher.The book meets a long-felt need for a study in English of bot...

"Thus Spake Zarathustra" is a literary work composed by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche between August 1881 and May 1885. The work,long and complex, it speaks of the myths of the eternal return, of the parable of the death of God, together with the prophecy of the overcoming of man himself (in German Übermensch). The entire work tells the story of Zarathustra and, above all, his descent from the mountain to the market to bring his teaching to humanity. The text, ironically, uses...

There are many reasons to despair at the state of the world today: climate change and global warming; widespread ‘humanitarian disasters’ caused by war, famine and political corruption; religious intolerance and the growing influence of fundamentalist belief; political terrorism; racism and discrimination against ethnic minorities; the list could go on and on. Reflect on such phenomena at any length and it can be very difficult not to become deeply pessimistic about human existence.

Alfred Percy Sinnett was a British journalist and occultist who played an important part in the affairs of the Theosophical Society during its first generation. In the early 1880s A.P. Sinnett corresponded with the Mahatmas Koot Hoomi and Morya. In these letters the Masters gave Sinnett the basic ideas of theosophy on the constitution of man, the planetary chain, the world periods, life after death in Devachan and Kâma-loka, the progress o...

Human Kindness and the Smell of Warm Croissants makes philosophy fun, tactile, and popular. Moral thinking is simple, Ruwen Ogien argues, and as inherent as the senses. In our daily experiences, in the situations we confront and in the scenes we witness, we develop an understanding of right and wrong as sophisticated as the moral outlook of the world's most gifted philosophers. By drawing on this knowledge to navigate life's most perplexing problems, ethics becomes second nature.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra is Nietzsche's most problematic text. There appears to be no thematic connection between its four Parts and numerous sections. To make it even worse, the book contains a number of thematic contradictions. The standard approach has been a method of selective reading, that is, most critics select a few brilliant passages for edification and ignore the rest. This approach has turned Nietzsche's text into a collection of disjointed fragments. Going against this ...

Before Marcuse and Laing, before Heidegger and Sartre, even before Freud, the way was prepared for the anarcho-psychological critique of economic man, of all codes of ideology or absolute morality, and of scientific habits of mind. First published in 1974, this title traces this philosophical tradition to its roots in the nineteenth century, to the figures of Stirner, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, and to their psychological demolition of the two alternative axes of social theory and practice, ...

Janko Lavrin's influential biography of Friedrich Nietzsche, originally published in 1948, analyses the bond between Nietzsche's personal fate on the one hand and the trend of his thought on the other, set against the background of contemporary crisis typical of mankind in general.

As multiple natural disasters occur around the world, a small-town business owner finds himself traveling across the country in search of a woman he barely knows, vowing to keep her safe from harm’s way during these catastrophic events.[Mature Content]

Nietzsche’s relationship with Wagner has long been a source of controversy and has given rise to a number of important studies, including this major breakthrough in Nietzsche scholarship, first published in 1982. In this work Hollinrake contends that the nature and extent of the anti-Wagnerian pastiche and polemic in Thus Spake Zarathustra is arguably the most important factor in the association between the two. Thus Wagner, as the purveyor of a particular brand of Schopenhauerian...

David E. Cooper elucidates Nietzsche's educational views in detail, in a form that will be of value to educationalists as well as philosophers. In this title, first published in 1983, he shows how these views relate to the rest of Nietzsche's work, and to modern European and Anglo-Saxon philosophical concerns.For Nietzsche, the purpose of true education was to produce creative individuals who take responsibility for their lives, beliefs and values. His ideal was human authenticity....

First published in 1931, this book provides a brief overview of the essentials of philosophy. It aims to combat the notion of the inaccessibility of philosophy by providing an introduction to its history and what the author believes to a ‘minimum dose…of incontrovertible philosophical truth’. The book merely assumes an ordinary level of adult education and offers an outline of the key areas of philosophy — consciousness, reality, experience, Life, God, love, aesthetics, conduct, logic — an...