Philosophy Department

Nietzsche Seminar
(PHEU 4911)

Babette Babich

Friedrich Nietzsche is known as the prophet of nihilism, proclaiming "God is dead," teaching the coming of the overman, the myth of the eternal return of the same, the ubiquity of will to power in a world of eternal chaos, the love of life, and the truth of the earth. Who was this "master of suspicion"? Was he Zarathustra? A spoiled follower of Richard Wagner? A failed student of Schopenhauer or a poor man's Kant? Was he somehow responsible for Hitler's Mein Kampf, for Nazism, and thus for the Holocaust and World War II, and even the first world war (which the British then called "Nietzsche's War")? In this seminar, posing these and other questions, we will read Nietzsche's works from The Birth of Tragedy through Twilight of the Idols.