"The book gives a uniquely comprehensive philosophical analysis of Nietzsche's thinking. It shows how this thinking has its unifying focus on values--both the past and prevailing values that his psychologies and genealogies explain, and the new values that he himself creates and defends. It maps, in detail, the argumentative structure of his thinking as it bears on this central topic. It argues that his ultimate ambition is to show how we can incorporate the truth about values into our own valuing-and that he is therefore more deeply committed to truth than often supposed. The book's chapters examine twelve key concepts, each at the heart of a network of problems and ideas. A first group of concepts (value, life, drives, affects) treat the bodily valuing he attributes to our drives and affects; a second group (human, words, nihilism, freedom) treat the valuing we carry out in our deeply-flawed conception of ourselves as moral agents; the third group (the Yes, self, creating, Dionysus) project the values he offers as the lesson of his critiques--values centered on a universal affirmation expressed in the idea of eternal return. Each chapter organizes the rich complexity of Nietzsche's thought on its topic, and works to resolve contradictions, often by showing how he treats the concepts and problems as historical. The book synthesizes these detailed analyses into a systematic picture of his thought"--

John Richardson here organizes Nietzsche's thinking around the central and unifying concept of values. Richardson maps in detail Nietzsche's arguments, which crucially distinguish three basic ways of valuing. The first is the valuing Nietzsche attributes to all living things, and to us humans in our bodies; Nietzsche insists that we already value in our drives and affects. The second is our distinctively human valuing, which we carry out as subjects and agents; these conscious and worded values are superimposed on those bodily ones, in ways Nietzsche finds deeply problematic. The third is the new way of valuing that Nietzsche offers as his lesson from that diagnosis and critique of our human values; these new values are centered on a universal affirmation or "Yes," epitomized in the thought of eternal return. Each of the book's twelve chapters examines a different aspect of one of these ways of valuing, showing the complexity of Nietzsche's thinking on its topic, but also its unity and consistency. Incorporating recent advances in philosophical scholarship on Nietzsche, Richardson's thought-provoking new interpretation will serve as a vital updated reference point for future work.

Nietzsche's Revaluation of Values is an assessment of Nietzsche's challenging plan to revalue all values, including knowledge, morality, religion, art, and the state. E. E. Sleinis analyzes the success of Nietzsche's enterprise as well as its inadequacies; among the positive contributions he singles out Nietzsche's theory of value, his conception of higher-order values, and his conception of the maximally affirmative attitude as creations of enduring importance.

Brian Leiter defends a set of radical ideas from Nietzsche: there is no objectively true morality, there is no free will, no one is ever morally responsible, and our conscious thoughts and reasoning play almost no significant role in our actions and how our lives unfold. He presents a new interpretation of main themes of Nietzsche's moral psychology, including his anti-realism about value (including epistemic value), his account of moral judgment and its relationship to the emotions, his conception of the will and agency, his scepticism about free will and moral responsibility, his epiphenomenalism about certain kinds of conscious mental states, and his views about the heritability of psychological traits. In combining exegesis with argument, Leiter engages the views of philosophers like Harry Frankfurt, T. M. Scanlon, and Gary Watson, and psychologists including Daniel Wegner, Benjamin Libet, and Stanley Milgram. Nietzsche emerges not simply as a museum piece from the history of ideas, but as a philosopher and psychologist who exceeds David Hume for insight into human nature and the human mind, repeatedly anticipates later developments in empirical psychology, and continues to offer sophisticated and unsettling challenges to much conventional wisdom in both philosophy and psychology.

Presents a fresh interpretation of Nietzsche's controversial account of nature and value in relation to Kant and Hume.

John Richardson here organizes Nietzsche's thinking around the central and unifying concept of values. Richardson maps in detail Nietzsche's arguments, which crucially distinguish three basic ways of valuing. The first is the valuing Nietzsche attributes to all living things, and to us humans in our bodies; Nietzsche insists that we already value in our drives and affects. The second is our distinctively human valuing, which we carry out as subjects and agents; these conscious and worded values are superimposed on those bodily ones, in ways Nietzsche finds deeply problematic. The third is the new way of valuing that Nietzsche offers as his lesson from that diagnosis and critique of our human values; these new values are centered on a universal affirmation or "Yes," epitomized in the thought of eternal return. Each of the book's twelve chapters examines a different aspect of one of these ways of valuing, showing the complexity of Nietzsche's thinking on its topic, but also its unity and consistency. Incorporating recent advances in philosophical scholarship on Nietzsche, Richardson's thought-provoking new interpretation will serve as a vital updated reference point for future work.

Examines Nietzsche's thinking on the virtues using a combination of close reading and digital analysis.

This book challenges the popular recent view of Nietzsche as an anti-systematic, anti-traditional thinker, and argues that his work is in fact highly systematic, and therefore congruent with the main traditions of western philosophy.

This book investigates the role Nietzsche's dance images play in his project of "revaluing all values" alongside the religious rhetoric and subject matter evident in the work of Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham, who found justification and guidance in Nietzsche's texts for developing dance as a medium of religious expression.

What, if anything, does biological evolution tell us about the nature of religion, ethical values, or even the meaning and purpose of life? The Moral Meaning of Nature sheds new light on these enduring questions by examining the significance of an earlier—and unjustly neglected—discussion of Darwin in late nineteenth-century Germany. We start with Friedrich Nietzsche, whose writings staged one of the first confrontations with the Christian tradition using the resources of Darwinian thought. The lebensphilosophie, or “life-philosophy,” that arose from his engagement with evolutionary ideas drew responses from other influential thinkers, including Franz Overbeck, Georg Simmel, and Heinrich Rickert. These critics all offered cogent challenges to Nietzsche’s appropriation of the newly transforming biological sciences, his negotiation between science and religion, and his interpretation of the implications of Darwinian thought. They also each proposed alternative ways of making sense of Nietzsche’s unique question concerning the meaning of biological evolution “for life.” At the heart of the discussion were debates about the relation of facts and values, the place of divine purpose in the understanding of nonhuman and human agency, the concept of life, and the question of whether the sciences could offer resources to satisfy the human urge to discover sources of value in biological processes. The Moral Meaning of Nature focuses on the historical background of these questions, exposing the complex ways in which they recur in contemporary philosophical debate.