Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche on reason, truth and knowledge

My dissertation focuses on "The Will to Power as Knowledge," the third chapter of Heidegger's 1961 book Nietzsche. The text is derived from Heidegger's 1939 lecture course of the same name. I provide an analysis of the relationship between the account of Nietzsche's epistemology and the place ascribed to Nietzsche's thinking in Heidegger's account of the history of Western metaphysics. My reading is guided by two questions. The first asks: what are reason, truth and knowledge in the account of Nietzsche Heidegger offers? The second concerns issues of reading: what authorizes Heidegger's highly appropriative reading of Nietzsche and the Western metaphysical tradition? The individual chapters of my dissertation examine the important themes of "The Will to Power as Knowledge": Nietzsche's troubling claim "truth is an illusion," Nietzsche's "alleged biologism," the "decision" (die Entscheidung), the epistemological and phenomenological account of what Heidegger calls "the schematization of chaos" and "the poetizing essence of reason," and Heidegger's Nietzschean account of the relation between truth and value, and truth and justice.;My principal contention is that Heidegger uses the vehicle of a reading of Nietzsche on reason, truth and knowledge to put forth a "postmetaphysical thinking of essence." This thinking is to serve as a new foundation for thinking and philosophical inquiry to follow Nietzsche's "consummation of Western metaphysics." Heidegger contends that Nietzsche completes Western metaphysics by replacing the separation between the true and apparent world that typifies metaphysics with an account of the relation of truth to life forces. My dissertation attempts to situate Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche between the claim that it is an overly determinate reading, still bound by the very metaphysics it seeks to overcome, and the claim that Heidegger simply reads his own philosophy into Nietzsche's. I contend that while Heidegger's reading cannot be regarded the final, definitive reading of Nietzsche, this does not deny the significance of Heidegger's effort. Through his reading of Nietzsche on reason, truth and knowledge, Heidegger is able to set the stage for the later turn in his own thinking and the philosophical thinking that follows in his wake.