Lexington Books
Pages: 306
Trim: 6½ x 9½
978-0-7391-2729-2 • Hardback • July 2009 • $143.00 • (£110.00)
Paul E. Kirkland is assistant professor of political science at Carthage College.
Part 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 1. Educating the Free Spirit
Chapter 3 2. Masks of Honesty
Chapter 4 3. Nobility and Responsibility
Chapter 5 4. The Esteeming Animal
Chapter 6 5. Willing and Time
Chapter 7 6. Redeeming Time: The Teaching of the Eternal Return
Chapter 8 7. Eternal Return and the Ethics of Contest
Chapter 9 8. Politics of Contest
Chapter 10 9. Heights of the Soul: Laughter and the Perspective of Life
Chapter 11 10. Challenging the Old and New Tablets: Nietzsche's Art of Writing
Part 12 Conclusion
Paul Kirkland gives an impressively comprehensive and illuminating account of Nietzsche's thought, emphasizing its life-affirming goals more than the critique of traditional metaphysics and modern science. Kirkland argues that in his major works Nietzsche takes on a set of distinctive stances or rhetorical "masks"—the free spirit, the proponent of perspectivism, and the philosopher of the eternal return—to create a "politics of contest." Out of that contest, Nietzsche hopes that a new form and understanding of human nobility will arise.
— Catherine H. Zuckert
This book makes a significant contribution, not only to Nietzsche scholarship, but even more to the current debate between modernity and post-modernity.
— Horst Hutter, Concordia University, Montreal