Nietzsche: The Arguments of the Philosophers

Nietzsche presents a problem to many English-speaking philosophers. Schooled in the tradition of Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Mill, and strongly influenced by the examples of Moore and Russell, Ayer and Quine, and Ryle and Austin, they commonly find it hard to know what to make of what they find when they open one of his books and begin to read. His prose is lucid and free of cumbersome phraseology and obscure terminology, quite unlike that of most German philosophers from Kant and Hegel to Husserl and Heidegger; but there are few extended, systematic discussions of particular topics and issues to be found in them. They consist instead for the most part in collections of relatively short reflections (often of an aphoristic nature), the drift of which is frequently unclear, and the connections between which are often loose if not simply non-existent.