Friedrich Nietzsche

 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (/’ni/tS@[/ (/’ni/tS@/, –tSi/) German: [’fRi/dRIc/vIlhelm ‘ni/tS@] (listen) or [’ni/tsS@] on 15 October 1844 – 25 Aug 1900) was a well-known German philosopher prose writer, cultural critic and philologist whose work had a significant influence on the development of the philosophy of today. Before becoming philosopher, he started his career in the field of classical Philology. At 24 years old, he became the youngest ever to be the chairholder of Classical Philology from the University of Basel. Nietzsche was forced to leave in 1879 due to suffering from health problems throughout his entire life. He wrote the majority of his core writing over the following decade. He was aged 44 when he fell ill and suffered from paralysis and vascular dementia. The rest of his life was spent with his mother Elisabeth Forster Nietzsche, until she died in 1897. Following a bout of pneumonia and several strokes, Nietzsche died in 1900. His philosophy is notable for his radical critique against truth and his support for perspectivism as well as his genealogical critique of religious belief and Christian morality, and an understanding of the master-slave ethic and an affirmation of aesthetics to the existence of life as a response to both "death" and the profound despair of nihilism; his notions of Apollonian forces and Dionysian force; and his description of the human being as a result of competing wills which together constitute the will to be power. His influential concepts included the Ubermensch doctrine and the doctrine of eternal redemption. He began to be more intrigued by the unique power of each individual to overcome cultural and ethical limits and to pursue new values and aesthetic health. His work covered a wide range of topics, including art, philology and history, as well as music, religion, tragedy, science, culture, and took inspiration from Greek tragedy as well as figures such as Zoroaster, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Wagner and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.