This text (1887) is about the history of ethics and about interpretation. Nietzsche rewrites the former as a history of cruelty, exposing the central values of the Judaeo-Christian and liberal traditions - compassion, equality, justice - as the product of a brutal process of conditioning designed to domesticate the animal vitality of earlier cultures. The result is a work which raises profoundly disquieting issues about the violence of both ethics and interpretation. Nietzsche questions moral certainties by showing that religion and science have no claim to absolute truth, before turning on his own arguments in order to call their very presuppositions into question. This should be of interest to undergraduate students of German and Continental Philosophy or 19th-century German literature and thought.
- ISBN10 0192831372
- ISBN13 9780192831378
- Publish Date 1 December 1996
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 30 April 1999
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Oxford University Press
- Imprint Oxford Paperbacks
- Edition New edition
- Format Paperback
- Pages 208
- Language English