Nietzsche and Heidegger at the End of Metaphysics

Is Nietzsche a philosopher or an anti-philosopher? Is Western philosophical thought one monolithic tradition? Sean Kirkland (DePaul Philosophy) joins us to discuss the position of such “threshold” thinkers as Plato and Aristotle on one hand and Heidegger and Nietzsche on the other. He also relates what he learned by translating Nietzsche for the new Stanford translation of the Complete Works. (This includes Nietzsche’s punctuation habits: Sean counts 13 colons in one sentence from Nietzsche’s drafts and 91 exclamation marks in The Birth of Tragedy.) Along the way, we return to the Greeks and the tragic vision of the world captured in Aristotle’s philosophy.

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