Friedrich Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil Reading Guide Part One. On the Prejudices of the Philosophers Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil is considered one of his mature works in ethics. As the title makes clear, he has philosophical questions about the distinction between what is considered good and evil, and he is trying to move beyond past ways of conceiving of the distinction. The book is quite especially on a first reading. In order to understand the text, some background will be helpful. Part of the background that is needed is an understanding of the history of Western culture—especially as it takes shape in the classical period of the Greeks. Another part of the background that is needed is an understanding of the history of philosophy in the Western tradition. Nietzsche suggests that a number of the problems that philosophers consider to be “timeless” questions about the truth are really best understood in terms of the particular questions that arose in a culture at some point in its history. For instance, questions about the nature of truth itself and whether it has some timeless character arose within Greek culture in the writings of Plato, Aristotle and others. There are reasons that these questions were pressing for the classical Greek philosophers, and we need to understand those reasons in order to appreciate the questions they were trying to answer. Here is some background for understanding what Nietzsche is doing in Beyond Good and Evil. If we look at the history of Western cultures, we see different cultures coming into ascendency and then dissipating at different historical
Friedrich Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil Reading Guide Part One. On the Prejudices of the Philosophers Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil is considered one of his mature works in ethics. As the title makes clear, he has philosophical questions about the distinction between what is considered good and evil, and he is trying to move beyond past ways of conceiving of the distinction. The book is quite on a first reading. In order to understand the text, some background will be helpful. Part of the background that is needed is an understanding of the history of Western culture—especially as it takes shape in the classical period of the Greeks. Another part of the background that is needed is an understanding of the history of philosophy in the Western tradition. Nietzsche suggests that a number of the problems that philosophers consider to be “timeless” questions about the truth are really best understood in terms of the particular questions that arose in a culture at some point in its history. For instance, questions about the nature of truth itself and whether it has some timeless character arose within Greek culture in the writings of Plato, Aristotle and others. There are reasons that these questions were pressing for the classical Greek philosophers, and we need to understand those reasons in order to appreciate the questions they were trying to answer. Here is some background for understanding what Nietzsche is doing in Beyond Good and Evil. If we look at the history of Western cultures, we see different cultures coming into ascendency and then dissipating at different historical especially
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