This is philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

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Humility and compassion are surely incontrovertible virtues. Well, not according

to the 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. On the genealogy of morals is his dazzling account of how we came by our current morality.

The book is part history and part psychology.

Though Pre-Froyd, it's full of deep insights into our conscious and unconscious motives and drives.

And according to Nietzsche expert Chris Janaway, it compels us to reflect on the values we normally take for granted.

Chris Janaway, welcome to Philosophy Pides.

Thank you very much for inviting me.

The topic we're going to focus on today is Nietzsche on the genealogy of morality.

Could you just say a little bit about who Nietzsche was?

Nietzsche was born in 1844. He was the son of a Protestant minister and a small town in

Germany. It was a brilliant classical scholar. Got a professorship at the University of Basel in his early 20s,

but moved radically away from this traditional scholarly background with his first book, The Birth of Tragedy in

1872, which is a kind of a lyrical attempt to capture the

spirit of ancient tragedy and also related to Wagner's music because he was quite a close colleague

of Wagner's.

Then he moved on later to a much more

aphoristic style of writing, one of the most brilliant writers of German prose,

I think everybody would agree Nietzsche is a rather acerbic but often very humorous style and the genealogy

of morality is one of his mature works from 1887.

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