The reception of Anaximander's philosophy by the young Nietzsche

Abstract

The main goal of this article is to understand the young Nietzsche’s interpration of Anaximander’s thought in his works Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks and the lecture course The Pre-platonic Philosophers. Our main focus will be Nietzsche’s reading of the key themes of Anaximander’s philosophical thought, like his notion of the apeiron as the basic cosmological principle, and his idea of what is justice (diké). In the course of this explanation, we will also cover some of the philological debate that exists in regard to Nietzsche’s interpretation of the so callled “Anaximander’s sentence”, also highlighting the relation that he believes to exist between Anximander’s philosophy and modern philosophical pessimism