ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses that commentators have written more about the influence of the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer on Friedrich Nietzsche than any of the other thinkers. And while Nietzsche's encounter with Schopenhauer is undeniably important, it is hardly more important than the other figures and movements discussed here. Indeed, in many respects, Schopenhauer simply reinforces ideas and sentiments that Nietzsche would have found in the intellectual sources. An even more important legacy of Nietzsche's training in classical philology is the sympathetic interest he acquired in many of the Greek thinkers known as the "Presocratics" and Sophists, who were active in the sixth and fifth centuries BC. Four themes in the early Greek philosophers are of particular importance for Nietzsche: methodological naturalism; appreciation of the limitations of knowledge; empiricism; and their realism. Nietzsche is similarly hostile to the tendency toward reductive materialism evinced by many of the German Materialists, who often appeared to embrace a mind-brain identity theory.
