Athens Corner
These are previews from my website AthensCorner.com of in-depth discussions on the Western world's greatest books in philosophy and political philosophy. There are also occasional previews for my Fathers & Sons series on the website devoted to guiding and assisting fathers who themselves want to educate their sons in the great books, and so the emphasis is upon examples of excellence of virtue.
Athens Corner
Aristotle and Nietzsche
Nietzsche's critique of Plato is well known, but it is not well known how indebted Nietzsche is to Plato's student Aristotle. Here I discuss the way in which much of Nietzsche's most important insights can be understood as appropriating Aristotle. On one hand, there is Aristotle's account of tragedy in the Poetics. On the other hand, there is Aristotle's account of the virtue of greatness of soul in the Nicomachean Ethics. With an eye toward both those accounts, I present an entryway into Nietzsche's thought beginning with his late preface to his first book, The Birth of Tragedy.