Nietzsche's sustained and often vitriolic attack on the morality and beliefs of his time, in particular those of Hegel, Kant and Schopenhauer. Twilight of the idols is a "grand declaration of war" on reason, psychology and theology that combines highly charged personal attacks on his contemporaries with a lightening tour of his own philosophy. It also paves the way for The Anti-Christ, Nietzche's final assault on institutional Christianity.

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...

"In 1882, the young Lou Andreas-Salome, writer, psychoanalyst and femme fatale, appears with Friedrich Nietzche and another man in a bizarre photograph taken in Luzern, Switzerland. Over thirty years later, an intense art student in Freud's Vienna presents Lou Salome with his own drawing based on the infamous photograph. In the present day, Tess Berenson, a brilliant performance artist, moves into an art deco loft in downtown Oakland, California....

Professors Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins help the user discover the heart and mind of this systematically unsystematic philosopher. Each lecture focuses on the specific ideas that preoccupied Nietzsche, while tracing the profound themes that give shape and meaning to his philosophy. These themes form the foundation of modern humanistic culture.

The "Long Debate" on the nature of truth, the scale of real values, the life one should aspire to live, the character of justice, the sources of law, and the terms of civic and political life is encompassed by the name philosophy. Three persistent themes--understood as problems--are knowledge, conduct, and governance, on which there is a storehouse of insights, some so utterly persuasive as to have shaped thought itself. Beginning with Plato and Aristotle,...