ABSTRACT
Hans Vaihinger, too, seems to place Nietzsche in the company of Mach and Avenarius. This chapter discusses the similarities between Ernst Mach’s and Nietzsche’s views on central epistemological and metaphysical issues. The suggestions that there are parallels between the ideas of Mach and Nietzsche and that Mach may indeed have influenced Nietzsche have both been made before. In one of his very few published references to Nietzsche, Mach makes a disparaging remark about Nietzsche’s ‘overweening’ Ubermensch at one point in the later editions of his Analysis of Sensations. Nietzsche has often been taken as presenting us with a radical attack on the pretensions of science and reason. One strong strain in contemporary Anglo-American Nietzsche scholarship would like to take his positive emphasis on the senses, nature and scientific methodology as grounds for interpreting him as similar in many ways to contemporary naturalists.
