Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was appointed Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basel at 24 in 1869, but resigned a decade later, health broken, to spend the 1880s as a solitary writer drifting through Switzerland, Italy, and southern France while completing his core work—aphoristic assaults on objective truth, master–slave morality, and the death of religion, alongside concepts like the Übermensch and the transvaluation of values. In 1889, aged 44, he suffered a neurological collapse and lost his mental faculties entirely, living out eleven more years under the care of his mot…