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 mother and then his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. She edited his unpublished writings to serve her German ultranationalist ideology, fabricating associations with antisemitism and Nazism that contradicted his explicit opposition to both. Twentieth-century scholars corrected the record, and by the 1960s his work surged back, shaping existentialism, postmodernism, and continental philosophy. He died 25 August 1900.