Show Summary Details

Page of

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 08 March 2021

Abstract and Keywords

This article explores notions about Nietzsche’s career as a philologist and his fascination with the Greeks. It considers his interest in Homer and the Greek philosophers—in particular, Heraclitus and Pyrrho. For Nietzsche, ancient Greeks such as Heraclitus and Homer were interesting not because of their doctrines, but because of the example they themselves provided of certain psychological types. Like the ancient skeptics following Pyrrho, Nietzsche was generally more interested in the psychological consequences of philosophical doctrines than in their content, and like those skeptics he often rejected any ambitions to limn the true nature of reality.

Keywords: Greeks, philology, Homer, Greek philosophers, Heraclitus, Pyrrho, skeptics, Friedrich Nietzsche

Jessica N. Berry

Jessica N. Berry is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgia State University in Atlanta, where she works on late eighteenth- to early twentieth-century German philosophy (especially issues in epistemology and value theory in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche) and in ancient Greek philosophy (especially the pre-Socratic and Hellenistic philosophers). Her book Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2011), finished with generous support from the National Endowment from the Humanities, brings together and expands upon work she has published in Philosophical Topics, The Journal of the History of Ideas, International Studies in Philosophy and elsewhere.

Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.

Please subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.

For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.