Anthony K. Jensen, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of History is reviewed by Andrew Huddleston at NDPR.
With the exception perhaps of Hegel, no major philosopher before Nietzsche paid as much attention to history. In work after work, Nietzsche is concerned to show us that our concepts and practices have a history, and recounting that often surprising and uncomfortable history is part and parcel of his philosophical methodology. Yet as central as historical investigation is for Nietzsche, relatively little sustained work has been done on Nietzsche’s philosophy of history — that is, his views on what historians are up to and what standards of success there are for a given historical account. This is an important topic for exploration, and Anthony Jensen’s contribution is a welcome one.
The scholarly erudition of Jensen’s book is impressive. He displays a deep knowledge of Nietzsche’s texts and notebooks and of the texts of many contemporaries of Nietzsche, some of whom have fallen into obscurity. Jensen does careful philological work in drawing on these in a usefully informative way, so that the reader learns a great deal about Nietzsche’s intellectual milieu and influences. The sort of Quellenforschung that Jensen undertakes in various places in the book is far less common in Anglo-American Nietzsche scholarship than it is on the European continent, and it is cheering to see it making greater inroads, as an important supplement and alternative to the extraction and defense of philosophical doctrine from Nietzsche’s texts….
