In Week 4 of our class, our main focus will be on another early Existentialist writer, the German author, Friedrich Nietzsche, the last of the three "fathers of existentialism." By contrast to Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky, both of whom are Christian thinkers and writers, Nietzsche is a staunchly atheist thinker, who famously pronounces that "God is dead," and regards Christianity as a "platonism for the masses." His academic training was as both a philosopher and a philologist, that is, a specialist in ancient languages. And indeed, Nietzsche draws much of his inspiration from the ancient Greeks particularly those prior to Socrates and his influence upon philosophy and culture. He is also a critic of modernity, modern culture and its pretensions, of old religions and the newer "scientific" approaches to questions of value and morality that supplanted them.

As with Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky, we will see in Nietzsche's works a similar emphasis upon the importance of the individual as the locus for authentic existence. He also shares with them a distrust of philosophies of progress, enlightenment, and society. And, you will see the same attentiveness to matters of emotion, instinct, drive, in short, the entire realm of affectivity. Questions of value - of the very nature of value and values - are at the center of Nietzsche's thinking. He asks what the values inherent or involved in various matters are, and one of his deep concerns is that we are now within a period of time in which values have become devalued, misunderstood, anemic. His goal is to steer us back to genuine, active, primordial values.

We will be discussing the following texts (which you'll find in the module "PDFs of Course Texts")

• Thus Spoke Zarathustra, book 1
• The Genealogy Of Morals

Some of the key ideas we will be examining together are:

• The problem of nihilism
• Freedom of the will
• Moral values and valuations
• The importance of emotions
• God and religion
• Authentic existence and self-overcoming
• Creativity and social conventions