Böcker av Richard Gotshalk

In an effort to clear up misunderstanding of his previous writings and avoid future misinterpretations, Nietzsche assessed his own work in the autobiographical Ecce Homo and offered readers pointers for properly reading and understanding his writings. The Well of Eternity addresses Nietzsche's thinking on time and temporality in eight of his works, beginning with The Birth of Tragedy and culminating in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, using the pointers described in Ecce Homo. Its detailed exploration highlights three points: how central the matter of growth and maturation was to Nietzsche's sense of what it is to be a human being; how indispensable his own maturational struggles and advances were to his achievement of reflective insight; and how the ideas, which are the culmination of his own reflection on time and temporality, not only have their enabling grounds in the human capacity ('power'), which his own maturational advance eventually brings him, but also have their intended reflective meaning and make their claim to truth from the reflective standpoint defined by participation in such power.

Loving and Dying is a reading of three dialogues (Phaedo, Symposium, and Phaedrus) which, using the figure of Socrates conversing in three different concrete situations, in complementary fashion address death, love, and reflection, as matters central to finding and understanding life''s meaning and to sharing in the kind of immortality that is open to a human being. The intent of the work is simply to bring to attention how the dialogues register as drama and how they achieve this provocation of the reader to reflection on these central matters in human life.

The Classic of Way and her power: a Miscellany? is a study of the profound and influential philosophical writing from early China, traditionally attributed to Lao-zi, the first Daoist thinker. This study provides a translation of the work, but concentrates on analysis. It offers an interpretation of why the traditional work appears to lack order, suggesting that it began as a set of twenty-five philosophical poems by Lao-zi, tightly arranged according to an unusual and unmarked principle of order, and then was added to by later figures in the Daoist tradition who obscured the original order by inserting their passages here and there in the extant text according to a quite different principle of order. Some of these later contributions are in keeping with Lao-zi's thought and style, while others are at odds in form (prose) and content (shallow) with his poems and their profound insights. This study also offers a commentary by the author, a philosopher, who seeks especially to bring out Lao-zi's unique insights and to distinguish them from the thoughts being expressed by others in the remainder of the traditional work.

Why does Plato write dialogues? Why more than one? The Temporality of Human Excellence begins with a brief introductory consideration of these questions, and concludes with a suggestion about two things: the intent of his use of this form, and the manner of its concrete realization in a set of two dozen or so dialogues. Taking up each dialogue as a separate drama, the reading seeks to focus attention on how each, by its characters, their interplay and conversation, and the apparent lack of positive issue to the discussion they engage in, contributes to a sketch of human excellence as a complex power developed and grown into as consummation in the maturing, over time, of a human being.