Aristotle and Nietzsche

Nietzsche's critique of Plato is well known, but it is not well known how indebted Nietzsche is to Plato's student Aristotle. Here I discuss the way in which much of Nietzsche's most important insights can be understood as appropriating Aristotle. On one hand, there is Aristotle's account of tragedy in the Poetics. On the other hand, there is Aristotle's account of the virtue of greatness of soul in the Nicomachean Ethics. With an eye toward both those accounts, I present an entryway into Nietzsche's thought beginning with his late preface to his first book, The Birth of Tragedy.