PHILOSOPHY SEMINAR FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE – 1844-1900 - German philosopher and critic. Years after his death was he acknowledged to be one of the most unconventional, controversial, and important figures in modern philosophy.

Nietzsche may be the most important philosopher of modern times. He outlined the limits to which certain kinds of thinking could take us. His thought has been borrowed from and stolen from relentlessly by every activist in the fields of politics, religion and governance. His work is a major contribution to the topic of “Existentialism”.

Ontology:
Nietzsche was a modernist, an empiricist – which is sort of the opposite to a metaphysician.

Epistemology:
Nietzsche finesses the idea of how we “ know” anything by denying the reality of any truth at all. While he uses scholarship and classical learning as an information base, he does not give any of it a higher standing as a source of a priori truth.

Axiology:
This is his field. Value theory, morality, and ethics. He talks a lot about aesthetics and gives it an a priori standing in determining what we should think about ethics and morality.

“Nihilism” is a key word for Nietzsche: he uses it as a negative quality, saying that the values modern men/women are adopting are wrong and basically undermining. In Russian, it was a slang term to describe the revolution of youth against traditional values. Nietzsche is not a nihilist personally: he is the opposite. He loves the Greeks of ancient times and talks about them a lot. He wants life values to be based on this world, this life. He rejects the notions of heaven/hell/paradise/the classless society and all similar doctrinaire ideas.

Nietzsche did not originate the line “God is Dead” He only repeated a phrase originated by others. He prefers Zoroaster to Jesus because the Zoroastrians believed in rewards and punishments in this life. In a metaphysics mode, he rejects the “otherworldly”. In discussing “truth,” he holds that there cannot be truth — only “perspectives”. There is no objectivity, no unbiased opinion, or so-called “facts”. (Note: this is post-modern analysis per Jacques Derrida, et al). In saying this, he refuses to be grouped with Plato who would say there is a “true World” and a world of appearances – a form of the “otherworldly”.

Nietzsche joins Kierkegaard in seeing the world through many perspectives – an aesthetic position. Truth is a pragmatic judgment call at any time (see the American philosophers, William James and John Dewey).