Nietzsche: The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy) - Hardcover

Nietzsche, Friedrich

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521631599 ISBN 13: 9780521631594

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2001

Synopsis

Nietzsche wrote The Gay Science, which he later described as "perhaps my most personal book", when he was at the height of his intellectual powers, and the reader will find it an extensive and sophisticated treatment of the philosophical themes and views most central to Nietzsche's own thought and most influential on later thinkers. This volume presents the work in a new translation by Josefine Nauckhoff, with an introduction by Bernard Williams that elucidates the work's main themes and discusses their continuing importance.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

Nietzsche called The Gay Science "the most personal of all my books." It was here that he first proclaimed the death of God -- to which a large part of the book is devoted -- and his doctrine of the eternal recurrence.

Walter Kaufmann's commentary, with its many quotations from previously untranslated letters, brings to life Nietzsche as a human being and illuminates his philosophy. The book contains some of Nietzsche's most sustained discussions of art and morality, knowledge and truth, the intellectual conscience and the origin of logic.

Most of the book was written just before Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the last part five years later, after Beyond Good and Evil. We encounter Zarathustra in these pages as well as many of Nietzsche's most interesting philosophical ideas and the largest collection of his own poetry that he himself ever published.

Walter Kaufmann's English versions of Nietzsche represent one of the major translation enterprises of our time. He is the first philosopher to have translated Nietzsche's major works, and never before has a single translator given us so much of Nietzsche.

About the Author:

Bernard Williams is Deutsch Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley, and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. His many publications include Problems of the Self (Cambridge University Press, 1973), Moral Luck (Cambridge University Press, 1981), Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1986), Shame and Necessity (University of California Press, 1993), and Making Sense of Humanity (Cambridge University Press, 1995).

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0521631599
• ISBN 13: 9780521631594
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 308
• Editor: Williams Bernard