This text is a continuation of Heidegger's lecture series on Nietzsche. It includes Volume III: The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics, and Volume IV: Nihilism. There is also further commentary on the much misunderstood doctrines of 'eternal return,' and the 'overman.' Heidegger argues against the fascistic Nietzsche interpretations by Baeumler and the like. Heidegger's Nietzsche is a metaphysical thinker, he shakes him off all attempts to situate him as a thinker of biologism or crude nihilism.
The diversity of Nietzsche's books, and the sheer range of his philosophical interests, have posed daunting challenges to his interpreters. This Handbook addresses this multiplicity by devoting each of its 32 essays to a focused topic, picked out by the book's systematic plan. The aim is to treat each topic at the best current level of philosophical scholarship on Nietzsche.
Nietzsche was a German philosopher, essayist, and cultural critic. His writings on truth, morality, language, aesthetics, cultural theory, history, nihilism, power, consciousness, and the meaning of existence have exerted an enormous influence on Western philosophy and intellectual history.
It is difficult to imagine a world without common sense, the distinction between truth and falsehood, the belief in some form of morality or an agreement that we are all human. But Friedrich Nietzsche did imagine such a world, and his work has become a crucial point of departure for contemporary critical theory and debate.
