In his book, Andreas Urs Sommer reflects on the question of what it really means when everybodys appealing to values, all the time the question, fundamentally, of what values actually are.Values explores both of these points, arriving at two intriguing suggestions: Maybe what we call values are just a set of elaborate fictions. And maybe those fictions serve some very important purposes.

Andreas Urs Sommer is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Freiburg, Germany, and head of the Nietzsche Commentary research centre at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

1. Existence Is Overrated. What Is a Value?.- 2. Even More. Where Do Values Come from? And How Many Are There?.- 3. Allure of the Temporary. How Is a Value?.- 4. The Power to Connect, the Power to Relativize. What Do Values Relate To?.- 5. At Home Nowhere and Everywhere. Where and When Are Values (in Use)?.- 6. Excursus I: Values and Human Rights.- 7. The Unstable Recovery Position. How Is a Value Positioned?.- 8. Miracles of Motivation and Guarantors of Paralysis. What Do Values Have? What Do They Do?.- 9. An Unruly Victim Tamed. What Things Are Done to Values?.- 10. Excursus II: Values in the Political Soap Opera.- 11. Against Prescriptions. Why Values?.