transcript
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WATCH:
▶ Why Nietzsche Hated Socrates: https://youtu.be/DM78nStythg
▶ Why Nietzsche Hated Plato: https://youtu.be/nEhNRuPh4As
OUR ANALYSES:
▶ Beyond Good and Evil: https://youtu.be/WIHXZUltfqk
▶ The Antichrist: https://youtu.be/qej1Z8Qzq_c
▶ Genealogy of Morals: https://youtu.be/6PUx4cOfFcI
▶ Twilight of the Idols: https://youtu.be/YpVr_NEvWYA
▶ The Will to Power: https://youtu.be/He6ZC7ZFBt8
▶ Daybreak: https://youtu.be/cOL2z7nuXdA
Thucydides was an Athenian historian and general. He lived in the 5th century BC at a time when Sparta and Athens went to war. He wrote down an account of this war in the work entitled History of the Peloponnesian War.
Not only is this work considered to be one of the first scholarly works of history, it also cemented Thucydides as the father of scientific history.
The History is marked by an objective, detached, some may say cold, style. Thucydides wanted to differentiate himself from Herodotus, the other great historian of Antiquity, whom he accused of making up stories or embellishing his history. Thucydides wanted to be as objective as possible in his assessment and carefully selected sources and eyewitness accounts with a critical mindset.
These elements might give an early hint as to why Nietzsche admired Thucydides. His praise for the Athenian historian is a consistent feature in his work, from Daybreak to Twilight of the Idols, written 7 years apart. Scholars have noted that throughout Nietzsche’s works, amid all the praise, not a single critical note is raised against him.
In this video we’ll take a deeper look at this praise. We’ll go over Nietzsche’s assessment of Thucydides as it appears in Daybreak and Twilight of the Idols and analyse the relationship between the two through two famous passages in the History of the Peloponnesian War: the so-called Melian Dialogue and the funeral oration of Pericles.
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