Nietzsche and Metaphysics

Recent years have 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. Peter Poellner 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and metaphysics, drawing extensively not only on his published works but also on his voluminous notebooks, largely unpublished. Poellner 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' andthe associated 'perspectivism'; his criticism of the metaphysician's 'will to truth' and the related analysis of the intellectual paradigm he called the 'ascetic ideal'; his notion of unconscious mental states; and the concept of the will to power and its relation to metaphysics. Poellner, 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.

Peter Poellner is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Warwick.