Steiner, Manuel
Congratulations on passing the oral examination on 31 July 2025.
Dissertation topic:
" Nietzsche's perspectives on Hellenistic philosophy." (working title)
Doctoral fellowship of the Gerda Henkel Stiftung (1 Dec 2021-30 Nov 2024)
Contact address at the University of Würzburg:
Julius-Maximilians-Universität
Institute of Philosophy
Residenz - Südflügel
97070 Würzburg
First supervisor: Prof Dr Jörn Müller
Second supervisors:
Prof. Dr Franz-Peter Burkard (retired)
PD Dr Dagmar Kiesel (Univ. Erlangen-Nuremberg)
Class in the Graduate School: "Philosophy, Languages, Arts"
Doctorate in the Graduate School from SS 2021.
Abstract:
Friedrich Nietzsche's philological and philosophical engagement with antiquity has been the subject of much research, but has generally been reduced to his intensive study of Socrates, Plato and the Pre-Socratics. The era of Hellenism, in which some of the most important philosophical schools and schools of thought to this day emerged or were first firmly established, is either absent from this research discourse or is considered fruitless, not least because of Nietzsche's relatively sparse and incoherent statements on the subject.
In my dissertation, I would like to show that Nietzsche's engagement with Hellenistic philosophy and his various perspectives on it are by no means a negligible side-issue, but on the contrary contributed significantly to his philosophy and to the development of his creative-artistic self. A new, more clearly structured and differentiated perspective is to be developed from the references to Hellenism scattered throughout Nietzsche's work, with a focus on the three main philosophical currents of this period, i.e. Stoicism, Scepticism and Epicureanism. This should make it clear that Nietzsche's reception of Hellenism is enormously complex and his attitude towards this epoch and its representatives is highly multivalent, i.e. it cannot be categorised into clear value grids. This, in turn, is symptomatic of the unique mode of Nietzschean philosophising in general, whose dynamic and experimental character comes to the fore particularly impressively in the study of the Hellenists.
