’Twilight of the Idols’ and Nietzsche’s Late Philosophy: Toward a Revaluation of Values

Thomas Brobjer revisits Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols (1888) and positions it as a rich and stimulating work that contains and summarizes much of Nietzsche’s late philosophy, especially his unfinished magnum opus, The Revaluation of All Values.

By examining the contents and the purpose of The Twilight of the Idols in relation to Nietzsche’s Hauptwerk, Brobjer shows the deep influence of the revaluation project on its construction, a theme ignored by almost all previous commentators. This book reveals more of what Nietzsche was reading as well as outlining influences on him at the time of writing this text, providing a comprehensive commentary that explores both German and English language scholarship. Detailed analyses of the moral, religious and scientific underpinnings of the text enable a new interpretation that is rooted in the project’s core philosophy, yielding more knowledge about The Revaluation of All Values as well as Nietzsche’s last philosophical thought and position.

Thomas H. Brobjer is Professor of Intellectual History at Uppsala University, Sweden. He has previously published Nietzsche’s Ethics of Character (1995), Nietzsche and the ’English’: The Influence of British and American Thinking on His Philosophy (2008), Nietzsche’s Philosophical Context: An Intellectual Biography (2008) and Nietzsche’s ’Ecce Homo’ and the Revaluation of All Values (2021).