Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a German philosopher, cultural critic, composer, poet, and philologist whose work has exerted a profound influence on modern intellectual history. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy, becoming the youngest person ever to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at the age of 24. He resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life, and during the following decade completed the core of his output as a writer. Aged 44 in 1889 he suffered a collapse and afterwards a complete loss of his mental faculties, living his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897, and then his sister until his own death in 1900. Nietzsche's writing spans philosophical polemics, poetry, cultural criticism, and fiction, while displaying a fondness for aphorism and irony. Prominent elements of his philosophy include his radical critique of truth in favour of perspectivism, genealogical critique of religion and Christian morality and related theory of master-slave morality, aesthetic affirmation of existence in response to the 'death of God' and the profound crisis of nihilism, and the characterization of the human subject as the expression of competing wills, collectively understood as the will to power. Human, All too Human: A Book of Free Spirits was Nietzsche's first work in the aphoristic style that would become dominant in his writings, and this 1913 English translation by Paul Victor Cohn of Part II includes Miscellaneous Maxims and Opinions, and The Wanderer and His Shadow, originally published in 1879 and 1880 respectively. The aphorisms vary from a few words to a few pages, but most are short paragraphs, and the subjects covered range over the whole human province-the emotions and aspirations, the religions, cultures and philosophies, and the arts, literatures and politics of mankind.

The book represents the beginning of Nietzsche's ""middle period"", with a break from German Romanticism and from Wagner, and with a definite positivist slant. Reluctant to construct a systematic philosophy, this book comprises more a collection of debunkings of unwarranted assumptions than an interpretation. It contains the seeds of concepts crucial to Nietzsche's later philosophy, and he uses perspectivism and the idea of the will to power as explanatory devices, though the latter remains less developed than in his later thought.