Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher and classical philologist (a scholar of ancient Greek and Latin texts). The son of a Lutheran pastor, he was appointed professor at the University of Basel at twenty-four, then resigned in 1879 due to poor health and lived as an itinerant writer across Switzerland, Italy, and France. His works — including "Thus Spoke Zarathustra," "Beyond Good and Evil," and "On the Genealogy of Morality" — examined morality, religion, culture, and the sources of value, introducing ideas such as the "will to power" and eternal recurrence. In January 1889 he suffered a mental collapse in Turin and never recovered, dying in Weimar in 1900.