PHIL 390.001 – Seminar in Selected Topics (Nietzsche)

Instructor: John T. Roberts. This course meets MW 3:35 – 4:50 p.m. in CW 103.

NIETZSCHE.  This will be a course on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the greatest western philosophers of the nineteenth century.  One of the first major European philosophers to take seriously the idea that the human mind, ethics, and culture are natural phenomena through and through (rather than something transcendent, immaterial, or divine), Nietzsche spent his life struggling with the problem of what is to become of values and culture once they are deprived of their traditional metaphysical and theological supports.  Nietzsche’s writings lend themselves to literary as well as philosophical approached, but in this course we will be reading them as philosophy.  We will read and discuss such works as The Birth of Tragedy, The Gay Science, Beyond Good and Evil, and On the Genealogy of Morals (all in English translation; no German will be required).

Prerequisite: at least 1 PHIL course