The Gay Science: The Joyful Wisdom (Digireads.com Classic) - Softcover

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm

Softcover

ISBN 10: 142093421X ISBN 13: 9781420934212

Publisher: Digireads.Com, 2009

Synopsis

First published in 1882 and revised in 1887, "The Gay Science (The Joyful Wisdom)" was written at the peak of Nietzsche's intellectual abilities. It includes a large number of poems and an appendix of songs, all written with the intent of encouraging freedom of the mind. While he praises the benefits of science, intellectual discipline, and skepticism, the influence of the Provençal tradition from which he drew is also an enthusiastic affirmation of life. Nietzsche additionally explores the notion of power and the idea of eternal recurrence, though not in a systematic way. Described by the philosopher himself as "perhaps my most personal book," he produced a work that is worthy of attention from anyone with an interest in moral psychology or the most essential themes and views of Nietzsche.

About this title

Book Description

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 in 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.

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Digireads.Com
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 142093421X
• ISBN 13: 9781420934212
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 173