How to Read Nietzsche

Intent upon letting the reader experience the pleasure and intellectual stimulation in reading these classic authors, the How to Read series provides a context and an explanation that will facilitate and enrich your understanding of texts vital to the canon.

Approaching the writing of major intellectuals, artists, and philosophers need no longer be daunting. How to Read is a new sort of introduction—a personal master class in reading—that brings you face to face with the work of some of the most influential and challenging writers in history. In lucid, accessible language, these books explain essential topics such as Nietzsche's thinking on beauty, truth, and memory.

Nietzsche's thinking revolves around a new and striking concept of humanity—a humanity that has come to terms with the death of God and practices the art and science of living well, free of the need for metaphysical certainties and moral absolutes. How, then, are we to live? And what do we love?

Keith Ansell Pearson introduces the reader to Nietzsche's distinctive philosophical style and to the development of his thought. Through a series of close readings of Nietzsche's aphorisms he illuminates some of his best-known but often ill-understood ideas, including eternal recurrence and the superman, and he brings to light the challenging nature of Nietzsche's thinking on key topics such as beauty, truth, and memory. Extracts are taken from a range of Nietzsche's work, including Human, All Too Human; The Gay Science; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; and On the Genealogy of Morality.

Intent upon letting the reader experience the pleasure and intellectual stimulation in reading these classic authors, the How to Read series provides a context and an explanation that will facilitate and enrich your understanding of texts vital to the canon.

Keith Ansell Pearson is professor of philosophy and director of graduate research at the University of Warwick. His books include An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker: The Perfect Nihilist and Nietzsche Contra Rousseau.

Simon Critchley is a professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research, and at the University of Essex, Colchester. His many books include Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity and, most recently, The Book of Dead Philosophers.