Alexander Nehamas Quotes

Alexander Nehamas is Professor of Philosophy and Edmund N. Carpenter, II Class of 1943 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1990, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He works on Greek philosophy, aesthetics, Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and literary theory.

✵ 22. March 1946

Alexander Nehamas: 7 quotes 0 likes

Famous Alexander Nehamas Quotes

“All we are now concerned with is the search for “new and improved” version of whatever means are already available for attaining goals such means make possible. The value of the goals themselves is irrelevant … What counts is doing things better than before. Whether such things are worth doing in the first place is no longer a question.”

Alexander Nehamas

Foreword to Alain Renaut, The Era of the Individual (1999), p. xi.

“To study the art of living is to engage in one of its forms.”

Alexander Nehamas

Source: The Art of Living (1998), p. 15.

“According to Heidegger, the blind desire for manipulation [of nature] came about because modernity turned reason—which was, for the ancients, and even for the medievals, a source of valuable goals—into a purely instrumental faculty.”

Alexander Nehamas

Foreword to Alain Renaut, The Era of the Individual (1999), p. xi.

“Both dogmatism and metaphysics … are attempts to project one’s own views on the world, and they are just as much attempts to hide precisely this projection from themselves as well as from their audience.”

Alexander Nehamas

Source: Nietzsche: Life as Literature (1985), pp. 33-34.

“For Socrates, virtue was nothing but its own pursuit. And only the promise of happiness is happiness itself.”

Alexander Nehamas

Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art (2010), p. 138.

“The one reaction Nietzsche cannot tolerate is indifference, and this is what his use of hyperbole is designed to eliminate.”

Alexander Nehamas

Source: Nietzsche: Life as Literature (1985), p. 28.

“Irony, which in Socrates’ case consists of saying “too little,” functions for him just as hyperbole, which is saying “too much,” functions for Nietzsche.”

Alexander Nehamas

Source: Nietzsche: Life as Literature (1985), p. 26.

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