Nietzsche and the Problem of the Greeks, or: The Birth of Philosophy through the Spirit of Philology

The lecture explores how Nietzsche discovers his philosophical voice through his struggle with the discipline of classical philology and its ethos. A close reading of the unfinished text "Wir Philologen" from 1875, which was meant to be a fifth Untimely Meditation, shows how his aphoristic style and the transition from a presumably early Romantic to a more Enlightenment orientation in his middle period, can be understood from within this critical confrontation with the very idea of classical education and its idealized image of the Greeks.

About

Hans Ruin is a professor at the philosophy department of Södertörn University (a department he founded in 1999). His main research interests include phenomenology, hermeneutics (especially Heidegger, and Nietzsche), modern French thought (especially Derrida and Foucault), early ancient philosophy (especially Heraclitus), theory of history and memory philosophy of religion, and philosophy of technology.