Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

This work dramatically rejects the tradition of Western thought with its notions of truth and God, good and evil. Nietzsche demonstrates that the Christian world is steeped in false piety and infected with a "slave morality".

A 19th-century literary masterpiece, tremendously influential in the arts and in philosophy, uses the Persian religious leader Zarathustra to voice the author's views, including the introduction of the controversial doctrine of the Übermensch, or "superman," a term later perverted by Nazi propagandists. A passionate, quasi-biblical style is employed to inspire readers.

"In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche's infamous protagonist sets off on a grand and noble quest to find meaning in a secular world and to live joyfully alongside the knowledge of death. In this new translation by Michael Hulse - the first in English by a poet - Zarathustra is revealed in all his bold and ironic splendour as a man who prizes self worth above all else as a moral code to live by. Radical, uncategorisable, contradictory and often humorous,...

The Birth of Tragedy is one of the seminal philosophical works of the modern period. Nietzsche's discussion of the nature of culture, of the conditions under which it can flourish and of those under which it will decline, his analysis of the sources of discontent with the modern world, his criticism of rationalism and of traditional morality, his aesthetic theories and his conception of the 'Dionysiac' have had a profound influence on the philosophy,...