Both Collingwood and Wittgenstein link philosophy with poetry. Collinwood thought that “good philosophy and good poetry are not two different kinds of writing, but one,” while Wittgenstein wrote that “philosophy ought to be written only as a poetic composition.” In this chapter, I present what these two philosophers say about the relation between philosophy and poetry and argue that, their differences notwithstanding, both want philosophers to express their times, just like poets, and lead their audience to the future in a process of self-knowledge and reform. Finally, I comment on Richard Rorty’s remarks on the relation between philosophy and poetry. I argue that, unlike Collingwood and Wittgenstein, Rorty wants poetry to replace, and perhaps even eliminate, philosophy, but agrees with them and Nietzsche that poets ought to act as prophets, not in the sense of foretellers, but in the sense of inspiring leaders and groundbreakers.

This essay considers religion in Pirandello’s oeuvre from a historical point of view, that is to say, as firmly anchored in a post-Copernican modernity in which, as philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously proclaimed, “God is dead,” and relativity came to be understood as scientific fact in the wake of Albert Einstein’s investigations. The essay asks whether a consistent meditation on religion can be found in Pirandello’s oeuvre and therefore considers several works, among them, The Late Mattia Pascal; Shoot!; Lazarus; and One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand. Particular focus is given to the ways in which these writings demonstrate Pirandello’s interest in mysticism, a non-dogmatic Catholic Modernism, and his rejection of any transcendent God, a belief which corresponded to his humoristic view of life more generally, tied as they both were to his uneasiness over life’s lack of certainty.

This chapter explores the Hegelian context of Wagner‘s works by considering the theoretical texts authored by Wagner in advance of and in preparation for his music-dramatical works. The focus is on the philosophical foundations of The Ring of the Nibelung in the politico-philosophical works Wagner wrote in the context of the Dresden uprising of 1849, in which he took part. The first section reviews the extent and import of Wagner’s theoretical writings, including State and Revolution (1849), The Artwork of the Future (1850) and Opera and Drama (1852). The second section examines the philosophical background of the Ring of the Nibelung, moving from the overt influence of Feuerbach and Schopenhauer to its deeper shaping by Hegel‘s philosophy of world history. Special consideration is given to the agreement between Hegel and Wagner in their civico-political understanding of Greek tragedy, especially Sophocles’ Theban plays, Oedipus the King and Antigone.

This chapter is inspired by Greta Thunberg’s challenge to global education that does not have the power to challenge twenty-first-century existential crises. Its curriculum proposals emerge from Evelyn Briggle’s, Robert Frodeman’s, and Adam Brister’s research on what they call field philosophy. The model joins philosophers with researchers in other fields to create solutions to environmental problems that require what Nietzsche calls a “mountain-top” vision. The chapter applies field philosophy’s methodology to address a fundamental philosophical question: How do we ensure life’s future and the planet’s health? Education grounded in field philosophy will promote the creation of knowledge rather than its assimilation at all levels of education. And that creation will be a collaboration between student and teacher.

An unofficial ban on Wagner’s music has existed in Israel since Kristallnacht in 1938. This chapter places the ban, its adherents, and its detractors, into the context of the early Zionists during the 1890s, and specifically their relation to Wagner’s music. Theodor Herzl, father of modern political Zionism and author of The Jewish State (1896), wrote of the inspiration he took from Wagner’s music for advancing his project, opening the Second Zionist Congress in 1898 with the overture from Tannhäuser. Wagner’s regeneration writings, the discourse of secular Jews in Vienna in search of ‘the soil’ for an independent state outside Europe, and Nietzsche’s advocacy of freedom from religious or dogmatic identities all combined in unfamiliar ways to advocate a future that abandoned a European past, with Wagner in tacit support.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s relationship to Richard Wagner and his music was complex, contradictory, even paradoxical. Neither Nietzsche’s emphatic allegiance to Wagner in his early years nor his later rejection should be taken literally. The revaluation of the performative moment in cultural analysis is part of a core of thoughts that Nietzsche chewed over again and again from his first years in Basel until his collapse in Turin. His conception of the Attic tragedy is based on the assumption that the tragedy must be considered in the original context, with its cultic background and performative outcome, as opposed to the reduction of the drama to a written text, as introduced by Aristotle and continued by the Alexandrian philologists. It is here that Nietzsche demonstrates the most in common with Wagner. Yet for Nietzsche, performativity becomes a type of thinking and writing through which he ultimately distances himself from metaphysical thinking and from Wagner.

The reception of Wagner’s music as physically affecting, sound that manipulates the bodies of listeners, took place within a context of research into human and animal physiology. From reflex mechanisms to sense energies, the physiological response to art brought about new understandings of ‘physiological aesthetics’ in figures from Herbert Spencer to Thomas Huxley and Francis Galton, with a corresponding ‘physiological music theory’ applied by Ernst Mach and Hermann von Helmholtz. This led to various efforts at quantification of ear acuity and the role of the auditory nerve.

In the shadow of decadence, critical evaluation of works like Tristan and Tannhäuser traverse the spectrum from appreciation (‘bliss of the spinal cord’) to anxiousness (‘Wagner increases exhaustion’). Against these claims, Wagner’s numerous writings on sentience (Sinnlichkeit), rooted in Ludwig Feuerbach’s philosophy of perceptual realism, were directed towards topics as diverse as a theory of performance, the role of critics, and animal testing.

Chapter 8 describes four significant obstacles to acquiring meaning: unconscious motives, the lure of the crowd, dividedness, and constricted circumstances that produce suffering. The first is explained using Friedrich Nietzsche’s suspicion of the real motives of virtuous actions, the second by existentialists’ suspicion of crowds, the third by Soren Kierkegaard’s and Augustine’s idea of resistance to what is good, and the last by the constricted circumstances of women and black Americans. The realistic conclusion of the chapter is a middle ground between the debilitating pessimism of some existential writers and the easy optimism one sometimes encounters in religious people: sometimes people overcome these obstacles and sometimes they do not.

Chapter 2 discusses the ways in which liberal ideas of Western origin shaped Russian political theory during the period roughly between 1895 and 1903. The pan-European reassessment of many fundamental positivist assumptions after about 1890 inspired the Russian Silver Age, and occasioned a debate between liberally inclined thinkers about the proper philosophical assumptions on which to base their views of selfhood, freedom, and history. Neo-idealist liberalism thus developed as part of the search for new forms of understanding to accompany the social and cultural transformations that Russia was undergoing. The chapter argues that both positivism and neo-idealism contained the philosophical resources to support a moderate, pluralist view of human values, but not all of their variants were liberal.