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    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

Thus spoke Nietzsche: “The criminal of criminals is consequently the philosopher”

In the twilight of his sanity, seething with frustration at being so widely ignored, Nietzsche wrote the rhetorically overwrought The Anti-Christ, the one work with the smell of madness about it at many places (he seems to have recovered a bit later that fall of 1888 when he wrote the more ingenious and ironic Ecce Homo).  The book concludes with Nietzsche's proclamation of the "Law Against Christianity," which includes six propositions, of which this is the second:

Any participation in church services is an attack on public morality.  One should be harsher with Protestants than with Catholics, harsher with liberal Protestants than with orthodox ones.  The criminality of being Christian increases with one's proxmity to science.  The criminal of criminals is consequently the philosopher.

"Science" is of course Wissenschaft, so no connotation of natural science, but it does mean a discipline that purports to produce knowledge.

 

 

 

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