Friedrich Nietzsche - Twilight of the Idols: or How to Philosophize with a Hammer

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (18441900) was born in Rcken, Saxony, and educated at the universities of Bonn and Leipzig. At the age of only 24 he was appointed Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basle, but prolonged bouts of ill health forced him to resign from his post in 1879. Over the next decade he shuttled between the Swiss Alps and the Mediterranean coast, devoting himself entirely to thinking and writing. His early books and pamphlets (The Birth of Tragedy, Untimely Meditations) were heavily influenced by Wagner and Schopenhauer, but from Human, All Too Human (1878) on, his thought began to develop more independently, and he published a series of ground-breaking philosophical works (The Gay Science, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals) which culminated in a frenzy of production in the closing months of 1888. In January 1889 Nietzsche suffered a mental breakdown from which he was never to recover, and he died in Weimar eleven years later. Twilight of the Idols (1888) is a wide-ranging critique of European philosophical and cultural values which provides a highly entertaining overview of his themes and styles.

DUNCAN LARGE is Lecturer in German at University of Wales Swansea, and Chairman of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society. He has translated Sarah Kofmans Nietzsche and Metaphor (1993) and is also translating Nietzsches Ecce Homo for Oxford Worlds Classics.

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FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

or
How to Philosophize with a Hammer

Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
DUNCAN LARGE

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Duncan Large 1998

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First published as a Worlds Classics paperback 1998
Reissued as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 1998

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 18441900.

[Gtzendmmerung. English]

Twilight of the idols, or, How to philosophize with a hammer /
Friedrich Nietzsche; translated with an introduction and notes by
Duncan Large.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Philosophy. I. Large, Duncan. II. Title.
B3313.G6713 1998 1793dc21 9728215
ISBN 0192831380 (pbk.)

5 7 9 10 8 6 4

Typeset by Pure Tech India Ltd., Pondicherry
Printed in Great Britain by
Cox & Wyman Ltd.
Reading, Berkshire

Cross-references within Twilight of the Idols are by paragraph number. References to Nietzsches other works are also by paragraph number, except for the correspondence and the unpublished notes not collected in The Will to Power, where volume and page references to the German editions are given. The following are the abbreviations used and the editions from which illustrative quotations have been taken: