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Justin Remhof, Nietzsche as Metaphysician, Routledge, 2023, 208pp., $170.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781032060620.
Reviewed by Mattia Riccardi, Institute of Philosophy, University of Porto
Nietzsche’s works are interspersed with harsh attacks against metaphysics. It is therefore no surprise that many contemporary interpreters read his thought as anti-metaphysical. Justin Remhof’s book offers a sustained argument against this exegetical tendency.
“It is not easy to say what metaphysics is”—so starts the SEP article on metaphysics (van Inwagen, Sullivan & Bernstein 2023). Similarly, it is often unclear what is meant by stating that Nietzsche is, or is not, a metaphysician. A clear merit of Remhof’s book is that it takes seriously the issue of clarifying what metaphysics is before arguing that some central tenets of Nietzsche’s thought belong to it. Additionally, Remhof rightly stresses that many anti-metaphysical readings take for granted Nietzsche’s own identification of metaphysics with “two-worlds metaphysics”—roughly, a family of…
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