The Quantum Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche, a 19th century German philosopher, conceived of the universe as a living thing and a partner with humanity. He was able to do this, especially by a complete rejection of Plato's philosophy. Similar ideas will not crop up until the major thinkers in quantum mechanics in the 20th century: John Bell and his laboratory apparatus demonstrating "Bell's Inequality," and in the "beables" and "beers" of David Bohm. By using the ideas of Nietzsche, one can see the uses and misuses of Greek philosophy, especially in the paintings of the Northern Renaissance vs the Italian Renaissance; in Rabelais and the Italian Renaissance; and in Romanticism in general. Nietzsche's work likewise provides a critical point of view to reevaluate the work of William Blake, Pieter Bruegel,Hegel, Luther, Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jacques Derrida, Michel Serres, Gilles Deleuze, many of whom were reacting against Platonism without realizing it. Nietzsche puts man at home in the universe in a way no other philosopher has ever done, thus discounting the bleak views of Camus and Sartre and giving a completely new view of existentialism and Christianity. The author gives evidence that most thinkers have completely misunderstood Nietzsche or have not admitted their debt to him.

A Companion to Nietzsche provides a comprehensive guide to all the main aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy, profiling the most recent research and trends in scholarship. Brings together an international roster of both rising stars and established scholars, including many of the leading commentators and interpreters of Nietzsche. Showcases the latest trends in Nietzsche scholarship, such as the renewed focus on Nietzsche's philosophy of time, of nature, and of life. Includes clearly organized sections on Art, Nature, and Individuation; Nietzsche's New Philosophy of the Future; Eternal Recurrence, the Overhuman, and Nihilism; Philosophy of Mind; Philosophy and Genealogy; Ethics; Politics; Aesthetics; Evolution and Life. Features fresh treatments of Nietzsche’s core and enigmatic doctrines.

How did Nietzsche and Sartre come to represent alternative modes of philosophy as antithetical thinkers? What exactly is their philosophical connection and how far does it extend? Tracing the connections between the existentialist philosophies of Nietzsche and Sartre, Nik Farrell Fox provides new readings attuned to questions of the self, politics and ethics. From their earliest to final writings, Fox brings into critical view the full trajectory of their lives and philosophy to reveal the underexplored parallels that connect them. Through engaging with new Nietzsche and Sartre studies as authoritative strands of interpretation, this book identifies both philosophers as twin thinkers of a deconstructive and paradoxical logic. Fox further re-examines their work in light of contemporary debates concerning posthumanism, vibrant materialism, quantum theory and speculative realism. The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche presents two iconic existentialists as thoroughly contemporary thinkers whose complex, rich, and sometimes-ambiguous philosophy, can illuminate our present posthuman reality.

Following Nietzsche's call for a philosopher-physician and his own use of the bodily language of health and illness as tools to diagnose the ailments of the body politic, this book offers a reconstruction of the concept of political physiology in Nietzsche's thought, bridging gaps between Anglo-American, German and French schools of interpretation.

This book argues, against recent interpretations, that Nietzsche does in fact have a metaphysical system--but that this is to his credit. Rather than renouncing philosophy's traditional project, he still aspires to find and state essential truths, both descriptive and valuative, about us and the world. These basic thoughts organize and inform everything he writes; by examining them closely we can find the larger structure and unifying sense of his strikingly diverse views. With rigor and conceptual specificity, Richardson examines the will-to-power ontology and maps the values that emerge from it. He also considers the significance of Nietzsche's famous break with Plato--replacing the concept of "being" with that of "becoming." By its conservative method, this book tries to do better justice to the truly radical force of Nietzsche's ideas--to demonstrate more exactly their novelty and interest.

This book is about intersections among science, philosophy, and literature. It bridges the gap between the traditional “cultures” of science and the humanities by constituting an area of interaction that some have called a “third culture.” By asking questions about three disciplines rather than about just two, as is customary in research, this inquiry breaks new ground and resists easy categorization. It seeks to answer the following questions: What impact has the remapping of reality in scientific terms since the Copernican Revolution through thermodynamics, relativity theory, and quantum mechanics had on the way writers and thinkers conceptualized the place of human culture within the total economy of existence? What influence, on the other hand, have writers and philosophers had on the doing of science and on scientific paradigms of the world? Thirdly, where does humankind fit into the total picture with its uniquely moral nature? In other words, rather than privileging one discipline over another, this study seeks to uncover a common ground for science, ethics, and literary creativity. Throughout this inquiry certain nodal points emerge to bond the argument cogently together and create new meaning. These anchor points are the notion of movement inherent in all forms of existence, the changing concepts of evil in the altered spaces of reality, and the creative impulse critical to the literary work of art as well as to the expanding universe. This ambitious undertaking is unified through its use of phenomena typical of chaos and complexity theory as so many leitmotifs. While they first emerged to explain natural phenomena at the quantum and cosmic levels, chaos and complexity are equally apt for explaining moral and aesthetic events. Hence, the title “Remapping Reality” extends to the reconfigurations of the three main spheres of human interaction: the physical, the ethical, and the aesthetic or creative.

Nietzsche’s thought has been of renewed interest to philosophers in both the Anglo- American and the phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions. Nietzsche on Consciousness and the Embodied Mind presents 16 essays from analytic and continental perspectives. Appealing to both international communities of scholars, the volume seeks to deepen the appreciation of Nietzsche’s contribution to our understanding of consciousness and the mind. Over the past decades, a variety of disciplines have engaged with Nietzsche’s thought, including anthropology, biology, history, linguistics, neuroscience, and psychology, to name just a few. His rich and perspicacious treatment of consciousness, mind, and body cannot be reduced to any single discipline, and has the potential to speak to many. And, as several contributors make clear, Nietzsche’s investigations into consciousness and the embodied mind are integral to his wider ethical concerns. This volume contains contributions by international experts such as Christa Davis Acampora (Emory University), Keith Ansell-Pearson (Warwick University), João Constâncio (Universidade Nova de Lisboa), Frank Chouraqui (Leiden University), Manuel Dries (The Open University; Oxford University), Christian J. Emden (Rice University), Maria Cristina Fornari (University of Salento), Anthony K. Jensen (Providence College), Helmut Heit (Tongji University), Charlie Huenemann (Utah State University), Vanessa Lemm (Flinders University), Lawrence J. Hatab (Old Dominion University), Mattia Riccardi (University of Porto), Friedrich Ulfers and Mark Daniel Cohen (New York University and EGS), and Benedetta Zavatta (CNRS).

Few philosophers are as widely read or as widely misunderstood as Nietzsche. In this book, Tsarina Doyle sets out to show that a specifically Kantian-informed methodology lies at the heart of Nietzsche's approach to epistemology and metaphysics. The author claims, contentiously, that both Nietzsche's early and late writings may be understood as responses to Kant's constitutive-regulative distinction at the level of epistemology and to his treatment of force and efficient causality at the level of metaphysics.