Member: JohnKress

I must recommend two books to you:

Nietzsche's philosophical context : an intellectual biography by Thomas Brobjer - http://www.librarything.com/work/3602397...

This is a very through study of what Nietzsche read compiled from what seems to be very through work in the Nietzsche archives. The author, Thomas Brobjer, has laboriously attempted to ascertain what Nietzsche read, when he read it, and to what extent he responded to those readings. While his interpretive attempts are fair at best this is almost certainly valuable as a research too. Most interestingly, we learn that Nietzsche had fair knowledge of both Kierkegaard and Marx- the former he read about in fifty pares scattered throughout many different reviews (which he occasionally annotated) and the latter through Nietzsche's reading of at leas nine work which talk about Marx at great length (in one Nietzsche has underlined Marx's name). The book also provides an alphabetical list of what, as far as we can ascertain, Nietzsche read and when he read it.

Becoming Heidegger: On the Trail of His Early Occasional Writings, 1910-1927 by Theodore Kisiel and Thomas Sheehan - http://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Heidegger...

Once again, Kisiel has produced a marvelous "reconstruction" of Heidegger's development- this time focusing on Heidegger's early philosophic writings spanning from 1910-1927. While not nearly as detailed and through as "The Genesis of Being and Time," there is still a wealth of background contained here. Especially interesting to me so far have be Heidegger's early "theological" critiques of modernity and he direction of philosophy. We also get to see his early critiques of contemporary epistemology. As a bonus, we get Karl Löwith's fictionalized description of Heidegger's pedagogical and conversational style.

posted by iwpoe at 9:20 pm (EST) on May 23, 2008