Acknowledgements
This project began in the spring of 2020 while I was living in Cairo, Egypt. Since then, a number of people have contributed in one way or another to its completion. First, I am grateful to Hilary Gaskin at Cambridge University Press for her interest in, and support for, this work. I am also indebted to the two referees whose careful readings of the manuscript afforded me valuable insights and suggestions for improvement, and which I believe benefitted the project greatly.
Parts of Chapter 5 were presented at the North American Nietzsche Society 2022 conference at Brown University, for which opportunity I am deeply thankful. The chapter benefitted from the discussion and questions there, particularly from Scott Jenkins, Anthony K. Jenson, Lanier Anderson, Bernard Reginster, Ian Dunkle, Andrew Huddleston, Kaitlyn Creasy, Toby Tricks, and Vasfi Özen.
I have been lucky enough to have people generously give their time to reading early drafts of this book. Others have talked through some of the arguments with me and offered valuable insights. In addition to some of the above, here I also thank Jonathan Mitchell, Severin Schroeder, and Paolo Stellino. All of the above are among those whose work has enriched my understanding of Nietzsche. In addition, I am grateful to the Cardiff University students on my course “Nietzsche and the Pessimistic Tradition” in autumn 2021, with whom I greatly enjoyed discussing much of the eventual content of this book. I am especially indebted to my friend and former colleague at the American University in Cairo, Abraham Anderson, who encouraged me to pursue this project, helped me construct the proposal, gave invaluable comments on the first draft, and whose own excellent work on Kant and Hume helped me think through the ways in which the pessimism dispute of the nineteenth century was in many ways framed by their philosophical contributions.
Many of the key issues that Nietzsche grappled with, and that are the subject of this enquiry, are close to my own philosophical interests. The question of the value of life; the function of beauty and sublimity in framing the worth of things; the roles of religion, art, and the sciences with respect to how we address pervasive suffering, and if those roles are compatible; the existential implications of a wholly naturalistic worldview; the dangers of individual or cultural nihilism of various forms – all are areas about which I continue to find Nietzsche both a provocative and an enlightening source for thought. I have enjoyed discussing such issues more broadly with friends as the years have passed, and I take such discussions to have contributed in small but significant ways to this project. There are too many to mention, but special thanks to the engaging company and insight of Staffan Snitting, Tomas Hubbard, Max Bienkowski, Reham El-Morally, Kev Walsh, Max Mitchell, Anna Zehnpfund, Kevin Chaffey, Panos Paris, Orestis Palermos, and my two brothers.
Parts of Section 1.2 incorporate a portion of an article published elsewhere: Patrick Hassan (2021), “Individual vs. World in Schopenhauer’s Pessimism”, The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 59(2): 122–152.
