Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 to 1900) was a German philosopher and writer who began as a classical philologist and was appointed professor of classical philology at the University of Basel in 1869, resigning in 1879 because of ill health. He wrote most of his core work in the following decade, until a neurological collapse in 1889. His writing combines poetry, cultural criticism and philosophical essays, and includes a genealogical critique of Christian morality, the contrast between master and slave morality, perspectivism, the saying that God is dead, the will to power, the Übermensch and eternal return. Encyclopedia.com credits him, with Max Weber, with moving ethical discourse from virtues to values. After his death his sister edited his unpublished writings to fit her German ultranationalist ideology, which tied his work to fascism and Nazism, an interpretation later scholars rejected. Oswald Spengler named him as one of the two thinkers to whom he owed most.