Bernd Magnus

Combines the multiple perspectives of Bernd Magnus, a philosopher and Nietzsche scholar, Jean-Pierre Mileur, a critical theorist/ Romaticist, and Stanley Stewart, a Renaissance literary scholar.

This long overdue English translation of Karl Lowith's magisterial study is a major event in Nietzsche scholarship in the Anglo-American intellectual world. Its initial publication was extraordinary in itself - a dissident interpretation, written by a Jew, appearing in National Socialist Germany in 1935. Since then, Lowith's book has continued to gain recognition as one of the key texts in the German Nietzsche reception, as well as a remarkable effort to reclaim the philosopher's work from political misappropriation. For Lowith, the centerpiece of Nietzsche's thought is the doctrine of eternal recurrence, a notion which Lowith, unlike Heidegger, deems incompatible with the will to power. His careful examination of Nietzsche's cosmological theory of the infinite repetition of a finite number of states of the world suggests the paradoxical consequences this theory implies for human freedom. How is it possible to will the eternal recurrence of each moment of one's life, if both this decision and the states of affairs governed by it appear to be predestined? Lowith's book, one of the most important, if seldom acknowledged, sources for recent Anglophone Nietzsche studies, remains a central text for all concerned with understanding the philosopher's work.

Combines the multiple perspectives of Bernd Magnus, a philosopher and Nietzsche scholar, Jean-Pierre Mileur, a critical theorist/ Romaticist, and Stanley Stewart, a Renaissance literary scholar.

Martin Heidegger's fame and influence are based, for the most part, on his first work, Being and Time. That this was to have been the first half of a larger two-volume project, the second half of which was never completed, is well known. That Heidegger's subsequent writings have been continuous developments of that project, in some sense, is generally acknowledged, although there is considerable disagreement concerning the manner in which his later works stand related to Being and Time. Heidegger scholars are deeply divided over that question. Some maintain that there is a sharp thematic cleavage in Heidegger's thought, so that the later works either refute or, at best, abandon the earlier themes. Others maintain that even to speak of a shift or a reversal in Heidegger's thinking is mistaken and argue, in conse quence, that his thinking develops entirely consistently. Lastly, there are those who admit a shift in emphasis and themes in his works but introduce a principle of complementarity - the shift is said to repre sent a logical development of his thi.nking. Too often the groups re semble armed camps.