Aaron Ridley

Nietzsche's late works are brilliant and uncompromising, and stand as monuments to his lucidity, rigor, and style. This volume combines, for the first time in English, five of these works: The Antichrist, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche contra Wagner, and The Case of Wagner. Nietzsche takes on some of his greatest adversaries in these works: traditional religion, contemporary culture, and above all, his one-time hero, Richard Wagner. His writing is simultaneously critical and creative, revealing his alternative philosophical vision, which, after more than a hundred years, still retains its audacious originality.

And Other Writings

Nietzsche: The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols

Alex Neill

Within this edition, five new sections have been added: on interpretation, objectivity, gardening, horror and morality and many of the introductions have been updated. The book should appeal to students of art history, literature, and cultural studies as well as philosophy.

Contemporary Philosophical Debates

Arguing about Art

Nietzsche is often held to be an extreme sceptic about human agency, keen to debunk it along every dimension. He dismisses the ideas of freedom, autonomy and morality, we are told, and even the very existence of agents or selves. This book sets out the opposite view. Ridley argues that Nietzsche is committed to an 'expressivist' conception of agency, a conception that allows him to develop highly distinctive accounts not only of freedom, autonomy and morality, but also of selfhood. In the course of the argument, the text revisits a variety of central Nietzschean themes including self-creation, the sovereign individual, will to power, Kantian and Christian morality, and amor fati often to unexpected effect. The Nietzsche who emerges from this book has a clear, if demanding, conception of human agency and a robust commitment to the value of human excellence in all of its forms. This comprehensive study of Nietzsche and the expressivist conception of agency is important reading for all Nietzsche scholars and philosophers of action, but is also of more general interest to academics and students in philosophy.

Nietzsche on Will and Action

The Deed is Everything

Nietzsche is one of the most important modern philosophers and his writings on the nature of art are amongst the most influential of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This GuideBook introduces and assesses: Nietzsche's life and the background to his writings on art the ideas and texts of his works which contribute to art, including The Birth of Tragedy, Human, All Too Human and Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche's continuing importance to philosophy and contemporary thought. This GuideBook will be essential reading for all students coming to Nietzsche for the first time.

Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Nietzsche on Art

New and distinctive approaches to five central topics in musical aesthetics are provided in this outstanding book. The topics are: understanding, representation, expression, performance and profundity. The theme of the book is the failure of the orthodox view - that pieces of music are more or less self-contained structures of sound - to account for some important features of our musical experience, and to explain why music should matter to us. In exposing and correcting that failure, the book introduces readers to the main problems and positions in the philosophy of music, proposes fresh solutions to those problems, and offers innovative approaches to the philosophy of song, to musical ontology, and to questions about the value of music. Each chapter is built around a single musical work, which provides a focus for the reader. Features Broad, accessible introductory overview to philosophy of music Original and stimulating insights

Theme and Variations

The Philosophy of Music

Aaron Ridley explores Nietzsche's mature ethical thought as expressed in his masterpiece On the Genealogy of Morals. Taking seriously the use that Nietzsche makes of human types, Ridley arranges his book thematically around the six characters who loom largest in that work—the slave, the priest, the philosopher, the artist, the scientist, and the noble. By elucidating what the Genealogy says about these figures, he achieves a persuasive new assessment of Nietzsche's ethics. Ridley's intellectually supple interpretation reveals Nietzsche's ethical position to be deeper and more interesting than is often supposed: the relation, for instance, between Nietzsche's ideal of the noble and the ascetic or priestly conscience does not emerge as a stark opposition but as a rich interplay between the tensions inherent in each. Equally, he shows that certain under-appreciated confusions in Nietzsche's thought reveal much about the positive aspects of the philosopher's moral vision. The only book devoted entirely to the Genealogy, Nietzsche's Conscience offers a sympathetic but tough-minded critical reading of the philosopher's most important work. Delivered in clear and vigorous language and employing a broadly analytical approach, Ridley's commentary makes Nietzsche's reflections on morality more accessible than they have been hitherto.

Six Character Studies from the "Genealogy"

Nietzsche's Conscience

This anthology is intended as a core text for courses in aesthetics or philosophy of art. It contains a wealth of readings from both classic and contemporary sources, and aims to present substantial selections from those texts rather than mere "snippets." Readings are organized historically within four broad themes so that students can see how concepts of art have evolved and been debated. Each reading is introduced by the authors, who suggest connections between the reading and others in the anthology. Unlike other anthologies on the market, The Philosophy of Art is both comprehensive and affordable, making it the ideal book for course use.

Aaron Ridley

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