In this second volume of a trilogy that represents a landmark contribution to philosophy, psychology, and intellectual history, Walter Kaufmann has selected three seminal figures of the modem period who have radically altered our understanding of what it is to be human. His interpretations of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Buber are lively, accessible, and penetrating, and in the best scholarly tradition they challenge and revise accepted views.

After an introductory chapter on Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer, with particular attention to the former's views on despair and the latter's on...

Walter Kaufmann completed this, the third and final volume of his landmark trilogy, shortly before his death in 1980. The trilogy is the crowning achievement of a lifetime of study, writing, and teaching. This final volume contains Kaufmann's tribute to Sigmund Freud, the man he thought had done as much as anyone to discover and illuminate the human mind. Kaufmann's own analytical brilliance seems a fitting reflection of Freud's, and his acute commentary affords fitting company to Freud's own thought.

Kaufmann traces the intellectual tradition that culminated in Freud's blending of...