Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy

The principal aim of this volume is to elucidate what freedom, sovereignty, and autonomy mean for Nietzsche and what philosophical resources he gives us to re-think these crucial concepts. A related aim is to examine how Nietzsche connects these concepts to his thoughts about life-affirmation, self-love, promise-making, agency, the 'will to nothingness', and the 'eternal recurrence', as well as to his search for a 'genealogical' understanding of morality.
These twelve essays by leading Nietzsche scholars ask such key questions as: Can we reconcile his rejection of free will with his positive invocations of the notion of free will? How does Nietzsche's celebration of freedom and free spirits sit with his claim that we all have an unchangeable fate? What is the relation between his concepts of freedom and self-overcoming?
The depth in which these and related issues are explored gives this volume its value, not only to those interested in Nietzsche, but to all who are concerned with the free will debate, ethics, theory of action, and the history of philosophy.

Ken Gemes came to Birkbeck in 2000 having taught for ten years at Yale University. In 2007 he took a Readership at Southampton University. His interests range from technical issues concerning logical content and confirmation to Nietzsche's account of how philosophy is merely the last manifestation of the ascetic ideal.


Simon May is College Research Fellow in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. His research interests are in German philosophy, especially Nietzsche and Heidegger, and in ethics and the emotions. He is author of Nietzsche's Ethics and His War on 'Morality' (OUP, 1999), a collection of his own aphorisms entitled The Pocket Philosopher: A Handbook of Aphorisms (Metro Books, 1999, second edition 2005, also published in Italian, Spanish and Dutch), Love: A Philosophical Investigation (Yale University Press, 2011), and other books.