"My sole aim, and if possible upon the most barren principles: this is the opposite of my desire, my procedure: Founding a true, new morality defying history, a new mode of existence for the highest man. Whereupon I let the instinct of human kind, the ponderous basic drive, take hold, to create a society as never before... I want a Dionysian philosophy: philosophizing with the hammer, irrational; like intoxication, music, and dawn.

…to make clear in which respects we wish to go beyond Plato, and not to accept and silently conceal the widespread old errors that have been Platonized as correct.”

Nietzsche's lecture notebook from his professorship in Classical Philology at the University of Basel (1869–1879) is an exceptional document that has had no English translation until now. Its handwritten Latin title, "Plato amicus sed- Plato und seine Vorgänger," translates to "Plato is a friend, but... Plato and his predecessors." This phrase alludes to the aphorism "Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas," or "Plato is dear to me, but truth is dearer," which has classical origins and was first recorded in Latin by Roger Bacon. The notebook captures the development of Nietzsche's thoughts as they formed. Among the primary lectures are philological and philosophic reflections, polemical outbursts, reviews, commentaries, and technical notes on scholarly publications.

The volume collects the best surviving manuscripts of four lectures that were thought to be lost. These include "Introduction to the Study of the Platonic Dialogues" from the winter semester of 1871/72, "Plato's Life and Works" from the winter semester of 1873/74, "On Plato's Life and Teachings" from the summer semester of 1876, and "Introduction to the Study of Plato" from the winter semester of 1878/79. The compilation also contains the only extant fragment of his 1878 lecture on Plato's "Apology." These texts constitute his main body of work on Platonism.

A modern rendering makes these previously unavailable manuscripts accessible. The source material is chaotic, filled with marginalia and discursive entries on many subjects. The difficulty of the originals offers a direct view of Nietzsche's intellectual process as his central concepts took shape. This edition contains a translator's epilogue on the fragments and other material that clarifies Nietzsche's developing position on Plato.

The notebook combines scholarly observations on Platonic dialogues, the origins of language, and Hellenistic philosophy with sharp philosophical attacks. Its structure is fragmented, containing marginalia, citations of contemporaries like Jacob Burckhardt and Georg Voigt, Greek terminology, and bibliographic notes. This composition documents Nietzsche's intellectual shift from classical philologist to philosopher during his professorship in Basel.

A principal theme of the notebook is Nietzsche's deconstruction of Platonic idealism. He describes Greek antiquity as "not a precursor but a miracle of the spirit," and he contends that truth is acquired through conflict, not accepted passively. He defends the necessity of the mask (Schein) for revelation, writing, "Appearance is necessary for the victory of truth... The Greeks loved appearance; they believed in the surface, the mask. Their deepest reverence was for illusion." For Nietzsche, language is a "great mask," words are instruments of concealment, and philosophy itself becomes a form of "disguise." He follows the synthesis of Christianity with Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy through figures like Plotinus and Augustine. He condemns Scholastic dialectic, as seen in Aquinas, calling it a "scientification of linguistic thought" that is detached from Plato's original mystical aims.

The notebook shows Nietzsche's developing method, which uses historical analysis to expose morality as "nihilism" and Christianity as a "Hellenistic phenomena." He dismisses absolute truths, noting, "I want a Dionysian philosophy: philosophizing with the hammer, irrational like intoxication, music, and dawn." The pages contain early formulations related to "Ecce Homo" and the "will to power." These ideas appear with criticisms of Richard Wagner's understanding of Greek cynicism and attacks on contemporary philologists, whom he accused of having their originality suppressed by "medieval scholasticism." The writing displays an instinct-driven and unconventional mode of thinking.