Abstract

May's monograph concerns one aspect of the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns. He presents six meditations on the relation between wisdom and knowledge, taking his bearings from a free interpretation of Nietzsche's Nachlaß. In an early notebook entry, Nietzsche remarks that science struggled with wisdom in the ancient Greek philosophers. That is, there was an agon between the salubrious but false Homeric myths and the "true" but toxic products of the drive toward knowledge. May attempts to resurrect this agon by reappraising knowledge and the soul.