In Plato's Sophist, the Stranger recounts a mythic battle between the giants and the gods, presenting it as a philosophical dispute over what ultimately exists. 1 The giants -or "earthborn," as he calls them -insist on locating being only in physical or material nature. 2 For them, what is is always a corporeal body. They deny the reality of that which cannot be seen or touched and thus "drag everything down to earth from the heavenly realm of the invisible" (Sophist 247c; 246a). 3 The gods or "friends of the forms," however, recognize the more fundamental reality of the supersensible and noetic. Historically, the giants and the gods can be seen as representing two philosophical lineages: on the one hand the tradition of natural philosophers (culminating in the atomistic materialism of Leucippus and Democritus), and on the other thinkers of metaphysical transcendence who posit some changeless, intelligible reality (e.g., the Pythagoreans, Parmenides, and, of course, Plato). 4 Yet, according to the Stranger, the dispute is a "never-ending battle" that is "always going on between these two camps" (246c). It is thus less about the history of Presocratic intellectual conflicts than it is about two living, recurring, antagonistic philosophical temperaments. Indeed, despite Plato's best efforts, post-Socratic philosophy would continue to produce its share of earthborn giants, even if they were usually a marginalized minority. 5 Perhaps the most significant and influential of these giants is Epicurus (341-270 b.c.e.), born just a few years after the death of Plato. His school, The Garden, offered a this-worldly alternative to Plato's heavenly orientation, and his philosophy laid the groundwork for what Laurence Lampert has called the "subterranean tradition" of philosophical naturalism in the West. 6 Indeed, it would not be inappropriate to call Epicurus the "anti-Plato." 7 Plato, of course, has long been established as the paradigmatic canonical hero of the Western tradition, while Epicurus was until recently relegated to its outermost fringes as a pariah. 8 Yet, like Plato, Epicurus gave rise to his own philosophical progeny. 9 This essay offers up a comparative examination of two of his more unusual intellectual descendants: Abū Bakr Muḥammad ibn Zakariyā al-Rāzī and Friedrich Nietzsche.At first glance, these figures may seem to have little in common. Al-Rāzī was a Persian physician-philosopher of the late ninth and early tenth centuries, a remarkable period of cultural cross-pollination and intellectual fruition in the Islamic world. 10 Nietzsche, of course, inhabited a very different world: nineteenth-century Europethe decline of Western modernity -in which the ambitions of the Enlightenment had begun to turn on themselves and throw themselves into question. Yet relative to their