ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Friedrich Nietzsche’s intellectual development in terms of his reading of books relating to natural science. The young Nietzsche had little interest in, and knowledge of, the natural sciences, and read few books in the field. The great representative of critical positivism or empiriocriticism, Ernst Mach, who was indebted to Fechner’s Elemente de Psychophysik and worked as a researcher on sense perception, argued that all empirical knowledge was the result of simple sense experience. During the ‘early’ phase of Nietzsche’s career – which spans the years 1869–1875 – the most significant influence on his thought was the philosophy of art espoused by Richard Wagner and Arthur Schopenhauer. Major and pervasive influence on Nietzsche’s attitude towards natural science was the famous biblical scholar David Friedrich Strauss. The most remarkable thing about Nietzsche’s scientific world-view is that, in a number of ways, it foreshadows the birth of modern non-classical physics.
