In this collection of eighteen essays, two-thirds of them appearing here for the first time, Aaron Ridley addresses the full range of Nietzsche's aesthetics, from his discussions of tragedy, music, and language to his conceptions of taste, beauty, and the sublime. Some of the essays are exegetical; some are critical (hence the 'quarrels' referred to in the title); some bring his thought into contact with other thoughts and thinkers; while others bring him into contact with specific artists...

These essays, half of them appearing here for the first time, address issues concerning the two key singularities that Kant identified in aesthetics: artistic creativity and aesthetic judgement. Ranging from Kant himself to contemporary debates, from song to conceptual art, from ethics to atheism, from function to failure, Aaron Ridley explores the ways in which the one-off character of creativity and judgement may defy our ordinary expectations of what an explanation should be like. Inten...

Nietzsche's late works are brilliant and uncompromising, and stand as monuments to his lucidity, rigour, 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. Here, Nietzsche takes on some of his greatest adversaries: traditional religion, contemporary culture, and above all his one-time hero, the composer Richard Wagner. His writing is simultaneously critical a...

This astonishingly rich volume collects the work of an international group of scholars, including some of the best known in academia. Experts in ethics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, political theory, aesthetics, history, critical theory, and hermeneutics bring to light the best philosophical scholarship what is arguably Friedrich Nietzsche's most rewarding but most challenging text. Including essays that were commissioned specifically for the volume as well as essays revised and edite...

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 ...

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 artthe ideas and texts of his works which contribute to art, including The Birth of Tragedy, Human, All Too Human and Thus Spoke ZarathustraNietzsch...

R. G. Collingwood 1889-1943Many philosophers have been interested in aesthetics, but Collingwood was passionate about art. His theories were never merely theoretical: aesthetics for him was a vivid, vibrant thing, to be experienced immediately in worked paint and in sculpted stone, in poetry and music.Art and life were no dichotomy for Collingwood - for how could you have one without the other? Works of art were created in and for the real world, to be enjoyed by real peopl...

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) was an extraordinarily original philospher, whose influence on twentieth-century thinking goes well beyond philosophy itself. In this book, which aims to make Wittgenstein's thought accessible to the general non-specialist reader, A. C. Grayling explains the nature and impact of Wittgenstein's views. He describes both his early and later philosophy, the differences and connections between them, and gives a fresh assessment of Wittgenstein's continuing influe...

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was one of the greatest writers and German philosophers of the nineteenth century. His work influenced figures as diverse as Wagner, Freud and Nietzsche. Best known as a pessimist, he was one of the few philosophers read and admired by Wittgenstein.In this comprehensive introduction, Julian Young covers all the main aspects of Schopenhauer's philosophy. Beginning with an overview of Schopenhauer's life and work, he introduces the central aspects of h...

Philosophy for busy people. Read a succinct account of the philosophy of Heidegger in just one hour.One of the two major philosophical traditions of the twentieth century was linguistic analysis, derived largely from Wittgenstein. The other, diametrically opposed, came from Heidegger, and its fundamental question was: ‘What is the meaning of existence?’ For Heidegger, this was not a query that could simply be ‘analysed away’ – it was beyond the reach of logic or reason. This was th...

Widely recognized as one of the finest introductions to existentialist philosophy ever written, Irrational Man helped introduce existentialism to an American audience when it was first published in 1958.Barrett writes with eloquence and clarity about concerns that remain as relevant today as ever: the persistence of the irrational and absurd, the search for meaning in a fractured world, and humanity's capacity to shape or destroy its own future without ful...

'The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking' Heidegger'We should never allow our fears of the expectations of others to set the frontiers of our destiny'Martin Heidegger was one of the most controversial philosophers of the 20th century, and still causes widespread division. Born in Germany, he was concerned with what makes beings intelligible as beings, and best known for his contributi...