Philosophy News

Keith Ansell-Pearson, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, has co-edited a new book with Paul S Loeb, Nietzsche’s ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ A Critical Guide, just published by Cambridge University Press. See here: https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/philosophy/nineteenth-century-philosophy/nietzsches-thus-spoke-zarathustra-critical-guide?format=HB#contentsTabAnchor

In ‘Ecce Homo’, Nietzsche writes that his book ‘ Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ is the ‘greatest gift’ humanity has ever received - the ‘most elevated book’ with a ‘voice that spans over millennia’. Despite this, anglophone Nietzsche scholars have been somewhat reluctant to engage with the work he took to be his true masterpiece. Nietzsche regarded ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ as his most important philosophical contribution because it proposes solutions to the problems and questions he poses in his later books – for example, his cure for the human disposition to vengefulness and his creation of new values as the antidote to nihilism. It is also the only place where he elaborates his concepts of the superhuman and the eternal recurrence of the same. In this Critical Guide, an international group of distinguished scholars analyse the philosophical ideas in ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’, discussing a range of topics that include literary parody as philosophical critique, philosophy as a way of life, the meaning of human life, philosophical naturalism, fatalism, radical flux, human passions and virtues, great politics, transhumanism, and ecological conscience. The volume will be invaluable for philosophers, scholas and students interested in Nietzsche’s thought.