Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality: A Critical Guide

Description

On the Genealogy of Morality is Nietzsche's most influential, provocative, and challenging work of ethics. In this volume of newly commissioned essays, fourteen leading philosophers offer fresh insights into many of the work's central questions: How did our dominant values originate and what functions do they really serve? What future does the concept of 'evil' have - and can it be revalued? What sorts of virtues and ideals does Nietzsche advocate, and are they necessarily incompatible with aspirations to democracy and a free society? What are the nature, role, and scope of genealogy in his critique of morality - and why doesn't his own evaluative standard receive a genealogical critique? Taken together, this superb collection illuminates what a post-Christian and indeed post-moral life might look like, and asks to what extent Nietzsche's Genealogy manages to move beyond morality.

Simon May is Visiting Professor of Philosophy at King's College, University of London. His monographs include Nietzsche's Ethics and His War on 'Morality' (1999), a book of his own aphorisms entitled Thinking Aloud: A Collection of Aphorisms (2009), and Love: A History (2011).

'This is a fine volume with a very impressive range, featuring genuinely new and, in some cases, provocative lines of interpretation. It will make an incisive contribution to discussion of this important text.' Duncan Large, Swansea University 'This collection is a showcase for some of the best contemporary scholarship on the Genealogy of Morality, and will prove invaluable to both scholars of Nietzsche as well as moral philosophers with an interest in moral psychology. Taken together, these articles make an excellent argument for the vitality, modernity, and urgency of Nietzsche's genealogical challenge to morality.' Judith Norman, Trinity University