Abstract

This book explores the metaphysical writings Nietzsche produced in his "mature" period, that is, after 1882. As its title hints, however, it does not focus exclusively on Nietzsche's own metaphysics. Poellner brings philosophical learning of an impressive scope to bear on his reading of Nietzsche, situating his views in relation to those of his intellectual forbears and testing them against those of contemporary analytic philosophers. Relying heavily on Nietzsche's notes, he addresses some key aspects of his metaphysics, including his skepticism and his treatments of "the will to power" and "the will to truth." A central line of argument concerns Nietzsche's antiessentialism: the view that it is incoherent to hold anything to have an essential nature and thus incoherent to hold any proposition to correspond to this nature, that is, to be "metaphysically true."