This volume is dedicated to the memory of Jörg Salaquarda, who at the time of his most untimely death was Universitätsprofessor für Philosophie, Religionsphilosophie, und Religionskritik in the Evangelisch-Theologischen Fakultät at the University of Vienna. Salaquarda had long been very well known to all of us in the international community of Nietzsche scholarship and was one of the participants in the conference at the University of Illinois in 1994 from which most of the essays in this volume derive (as is explained in the Introduction). He was a leading light in Nietzsche scholarship and will be greatly missed on that account; but he will be missed at least as much for the decency, integrity, and cosmopolitanism that he brought to his work and to his interactions with his colleagues in this international community he did so much to foster.

Salaquarda exemplified the kind of philosophical temperament and sensibility that many of us feel will best serve both the Nietzsche studies and (in Nietzsche's phrase) “the philosophy of the future”: at once intellectually conscientious and independently minded, with respect to the reinterpretation and reevaluation of both Nietzsche's thinking and the things he was trying to think about. This temperament – which was modeled in exemplary fashion by Nietzsche himself at his best – characterized the 1994 conference more generally; and it is reflected in the spirit of the essays in this volume, even if the mix of these traits may vary among them.