This article revisits the author’s influential account of Nietzche as a philosophical naturalist. It identifies the sources of Nietzsche’s position in the German naturalism of the mid-nineteenth century, in particular the work of Friedrich Lange. His naturalism is, however, “speculative” in that he postulates causal mechanisms not confirmed by science. Nietzsche’s ambition to explain morality naturalistically coexists with a “therapeutic” ambition to induce some readers to escape from morality. The article also addresses doubts that might arise against reading (...) Nietzsche as a naturalist. (shrink)

This book explores Nietzsche's philosophical naturalism in its historical context, showing that his position is best understood against the background of encounters between neo-Kantianism and the life sciences in the nineteenth century. Analyzing most of Nietzsche's writings from the late 1860s onwards, Christian J. Emden reconstructs Nietzsche's naturalism and argues for a new understanding of his account of nature and normativity. Emden proposes historical reasons why Nietzsche came to adopt the position he did; his genealogy (...) of values and his account of a will to power are as much influenced by Kantian thought as they are by nineteenth-century debates on teleology, biological functions, and theories of evolution. This rich and wide-ranging study will be of interest to scholars and students of Nietzsche, the history of modern philosophy, intellectual history, and history of science. (shrink)

This paper argues that Nietzsche shares the aim of contemporary Sellarsian efforts to reconcile the natural and the normative. However, as Joseph Rouse notes, the Sellarsian strategy collapses into dualism by virtue of its treatment of natural causality and normativity as different in kind and of the normative as operating parallel to the causal (Rouse 2002). The paper argues that Nietzsche avoids this dualism by offering a constitutively causal account of the normative. He does this by identifying the normative with (...) dominant drives of the self. It is argued that these dominant drives, like natural causes in the world, are modally dispositional and differ from natural causes in degree rather than dualistically in kind. However, the identification of the normative status of our values with dominant drives has been subject to strenuous criticism. Specifically, it is argued that the normative cannot be identified with dominant drives for fear of eliminating the normative. The paper responds to these criticisms in detail and argues that the constitutively causal account of normativity that stems from Nietzsche’s identification of the normative with dominant drives can be defended. (shrink)

Christian Emden has written an informative if sometimes philosophically frustrating book about Nietzsche’s engagement with both neo-Kantian philosophers 1 and the life sciences from the 1840s onward. Emden documents the preceding with an eye to shedding light not only on Nietzsche’s naturalism, on “what does it mean to ‘translate humanity back into nature’” as Nietzsche put it in BGE, but also on what Emden calls “the problem of normativity,” variously stated as how to “obtain an understanding of the sources (...) of normativity without appealing to normativity as a standard separate from the agency, affects... (shrink)

Christian Emden’s book is a contribution to the current debates in the English-language literature over Nietzsche’s “naturalism.” Emden regards this subject as “crucial to any understanding of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical thought”, claiming that the “central task of Nietzsche’s philosophical project” is to “translate humanity back into nature,” as Nietzsche himself puts it in BGE 230. However, Emden does not undertake to demonstrate this thesis as such. Rather, he aims to interpret Nietzsche’s naturalism in terms of the “problem of (...) normativity”, that of how the sources of normativity can be understood without appealing to a normative standard independent of us as natural beings.... (shrink)

This book presents a new interpretation of Nietzsche’s discussions of truth and knowledge, covering the period from his early essay “On Truth and Lies” to his late notebooks. It views these discussions in the context of the neo-Kantian, Naturalist, Positivist, and Pragmatic schools influential in Nietzsche’s late nineteenth-century Europe.

Name der Zeitschrift: Nietzsche-Studien Jahrgang: 45 Heft: 1 Seiten: 178-188.

In this paper, I directly oppose Nietzsche ’s endorsement of a morality of breeding to all forms of comparative, positive eugenics: the use of genetic selection to introduce positive improvement in individuals or the species, based on negatively or comparatively defined traits. I begin by explaining Nietzsche ’s contrast between two broad categories of morality: breeding and taming. I argue that the ethical dangers of positive eugenics are grounded in their status as forms of taming, which preserves positively evaluated character (...) traits and types through the active de-selection of negatively evaluated ones. The morality of taming is not a form of selection, but de-selection: the production of counter or anti-traits and types. Consequently, in its attempt to improve humanity, it tends necessarily toward violence as the elimination of de-selected forms of human life. In contrast, Nietzsche ’s morality of breeding selects traits and types by protecting them from de-selection—specifically, by attacking moral ideas, values, and practices designed to eliminate them. It tends not towards the destruction but preservation of types; its negativity targets not life but the ideas that disable, disempower, and eradicate forms of life. I argue, further, that the fundamental ethical difference between breeding and taming, and so between Nietzschean morality and eugenics, is found in their attitudes toward the natural world. The violence of eugenics as taming is grounded in its status as anti-natural, while Nietzsche ’s morality of breeding resists violence through its foundational affirmation of the conditions and limitations of the natural world: its resolute moral naturalism. Finally, I apply my interpretation of breeding and taming to two cases of comparative, positive eugenics: the historical case of racial eugenics and the so-called “designer baby” case in contemporary liberal eugenics. Nietzsche must condemn both as forms of the anti-natural morality of taming, to which the morality of breeding is diametrically opposed. (shrink)

A central thesis of my interpretation of Nietzsche has long been that he fundamentally was a naturalistic thinker, who had a significant philosophical agenda that is best understood accordingly.1 This is a characterization with which many—in the analytically minded part of the philosophical community, at any rate—have come to agree. But there are many kinds of things called "naturalism" in the philosophical literature; and it would be a mistake to suppose that any of them in particular is what Nietzsche (...) espoused or was moving toward—especially since there are some kinds of naturalism of which he himself is quite disdainful, and even scathingly critical. For example, there is the "mechanistic" kind he calls one of .. (shrink)

In Nietzsche's Justice, Peter Sedgwick takes the theme of justice to the very heart of the great thinker's philosophy. He argues that Nietzsche's treatment of justice springs from an engagement with the themes charted in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, which invokes the notion of an absolute justice grasped by way of artistic metaphysics. Nietzsche's encounter with Greek tragedy spurs the development of an oracular conception of justice capable of transcending rigid social convention. Sedgwick argues (...) that although Nietzsche's later writings reject his earlier metaphysics, his mature thought is not characterized by a rejection of the possibility of the oracular articulation of justice found in the Birth. Rather, in the aftermath of his rejection of traditional accounts of the nature of will, moral responsibility, and punishment, Nietzsche seeks to rejuvenate justice in naturalistic terms. This rejuvenation is grounded in a radical reinterpretation of the nature of human freedom and in a vision of genuine philosophical thought as the legislation of values and the embracing of an ethic of mercy. The pursuit of this ethic invites a revaluation of the principles explored in Nietzsche's last writings. Smart, concise, and accessibly written, Nietzsche's Justice reveals a philosopher who is both socially embedded and oriented toward contemporary debates on the nature of the modern state. (shrink)

There can be little doubt that the “will to power” remains one of Nietzsche’s most controversial philosophical concepts. Leaving aside its colorful and controversial political history in the first half of the twentieth century, the will to power poses considerable problems for any serious reconstruction of Nietzsche’s project. This is particularly the case for analytic reconstructions, which view Nietzsche’s philosophical naturalism largely through the lens of metaethical concerns that are themselves grounded in a psychological reading of will, affect, value, (...) or ressentiment.1 The will to power, though, defies interpretations that are schooled in contemporary philosophy of mind, or cognitive psychology. Even.. (shrink)

Several scholars align Nietzsche’s philosophy with Stoicism because of their naturalist approaches to ethics and doctrines of eternal recurrence. Yet this alignment is difficult to reconcile with Nietzsche’s criticisms of Stoicism’s ethical ideal of living according to nature by dispassionately accepting fate—so much so that some conclude that Nietzsche’s rebuke of Stoicism undermines his own philosophical project. I argue that affinities between Nietzsche and Stoicism belie deeper disagreement about teleology, which, in turn, yields different understandings of nature and human flourishing, (...) so that Nietzsche’s objections to Stoicism support his commitments to ethical naturalism and to affirming life’s eternal recurrence. (shrink)

This paper is primarily a response to ‘analytically-minded’ philosophers, such as Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter, who push for a ‘naturalistic’ interpretation of Nietzsche. In particular, this paper will consider Leiter’s (2007) discussion of Nietzsche’s chapter in Twilight of the Idols, ‘The Four Great Errors’, and argue that Leiter has misinterpreted this chapter in at least four ways. I provide a superior interpretation of this chapter, which argues that Nietzsche is using a transcendental style of argument to argue against a (...) common conception of causation. I argue that Nietzsche’s ultimate aim of this chapter is to argue for ‘the innocence of becoming’ rather than, as Leiter claims, the error of free will. I argue that this anti-naturalist methodology and conclusion are in tension with Leiter/clark’s Nietzsche, and highlights the need to pay attention to the being/becoming distinction in Nietzsche. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Nietzsche’s published works contain a substantial, although implicit, argument for the will to power as ontology—a critical and descriptive, rather than positive and explanatory, theory of reality. Further, I suggest this ontology is entirely consistent with a naturalist methodology. The will to power ontology follows directly from Nietzsche’s naturalist rejection of three metaphysical presuppositions: substance, efficient causality, and final causality. I show that a number of interpretations, including those of Clark, Schacht, Reginster, and Richardson, (...) are inconsistent with Nietzsche’s naturalism, because they presuppose efficient or final causality. In contrast, I argue that the will to power is not an explanatory theory, but a description of the basic, necessary character of reality, designed to critically reveal and minimize metaphysical presuppositions—to reject false explanations of reality and human behavior. It avoids substance-metaphysics by describing reality as will, a causal process without discrete efficient causes or agents. It eliminates efficient causality by describing events as maximal manifestations of power, rather than as agent-actualized potentialities. Finally, it opposes teleology by describing life as tending toward the activity of resistance as such, rather than toward explanatory end-states, such as the accumulation of power or overcoming of resistances. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s endorsement of a “morality of breeding” or “cultivation” (Züchtung), which he opposes to the morality of “taming” or “domestication” (Zähmen), invites worry that his philosophy may be compatible with ethically dangerous forms of eugenics and, consequently, with the historically associated, abhorrent practices of discrimination, racism, and genocide (TI, “Improvers” 5). While there is a general, if not absolute, consensus that Nietzsche does not actively endorse discrimination or violence, the failure to clearly exclude such egregious views would be sufficient reason (...) to dismiss any positive contribution Nietzsche might make to ethical philosophy. In this paper, I directly oppose Nietzsche’s endorsement of a morality of breeding to all forms of comparative, positive eugenics: the use of genetic selection to introduce positive improvement in individuals or the species, based on negatively or comparatively defined traits. This category includes social Darwinist theories common in the United States and the United Kingdom in the early twentieth century, the racial eugenic theories of National Socialism, and contemporary “liberal,” non-coercive eugenics. I begin by explaining Nietzsche’s contrast between two broad categories of morality: breeding and taming. I argue that the ethical dangers of positive eugenics are grounded in their status as forms of taming, which preserves positively evaluated character traits and types through the active de-selection of negatively evaluated ones. The morality of taming is not a form of selection, but de-selection: the production of counter or anti-traits and types. Consequently, in its attempt to improve humanity, it tends necessarily toward violence as the elimination of de-selected forms of human life. In contrast, Nietzsche’s morality of breeding selects traits and types by protecting them from de-selection—specifically, by attacking moral ideas, values, and practices designed to eliminate them. It tends not towards the destruction but preservation of types; its negativity targets not life but the ideas that disable, disempower, and eradicate forms of life. I argue, further, that the fundamental ethical difference between breeding and taming, and so between Nietzschean morality and eugenics, is found in their attitudes toward the natural world. The violence of eugenics as taming is grounded in its status as anti-natural, while Nietzsche’s morality of breeding resists violence through its foundational affirmation of the conditions and limitations of the natural world: its resolute moral naturalism. Finally, I apply my interpretation of breeding and taming to two cases of comparative, positive eugenics: the historical case of racial eugenics and the so-called “designer baby” case in contemporary liberal eugenics. Nietzsche must condemn both as forms of the anti-natural morality of taming, to which the morality of breeding is diametrically opposed. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s favourable comments about science and the senses have recently been taken as evidence of naturalism. Others focus on his falsification thesis: our beliefs are falsifying interpretations of reality. Clark argues that Nietzsche eventually rejects this thesis. This article utilizes the multiple ways of being science friendly in Nietzsche’s context by focussing on Mach’s neutral monism. Mach’s positivism is a natural development of neo-Kantian positions Nietzsche was reacting to. Section 15 of Beyond Good and Evil is crucial to Clark’s (...) interpretation. The presented interpretation makes better sense of this passage and shows that Nietzsche can accept both falsification and empiricism. (shrink)

This article presents a critique of the current naturalist readings of Nietzsche by drawing a distinction between a sense of naturalism based on nature taken as "what there is" and one based on the scientific concept of nature. The paper suggests that Nietzsche is a naturalist in the first sense, but not in the latter, and that due to the confusion between the two sense, many arguments in favor of the first have been unwarrantedly transferred into the latter. The (...) article begins with a close critical reading of Brian Leiter's "Nietzsche's Naturalism Revisited" before confronting the naturalist readings with one case of Nietzsche's writings, found in Daybreak's Book V. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Nietzsche's (Artful) Naturalism The Subject Naturalized Nietzsche's Artful Naturalism Toward an Ethos of the Agonized Subject.

Nietzsche’s late writings present a value opposition of health and decadence based in his conception of organic life. While this appears to be a moral ideal that risks the naturalistic fallacy of directly deriving norms from facts, it instead describes a meta-ethical ideal: the necessary conditions for any kind of moral agency. Nietzsche’s ideal of health not only evades but also dissolves the naturalistic fallacy by suggesting that the specific content of morality is irrelevant. If health is measured by power (...) over one’s drives rather than the environment, then the source of moral conflict—organic life’s essential tendency toward domination—is surmounted by successful integration of any moral norms, regardless of content. Nietzsche’s concept of health draws on his characterization of organic life as essentially ‘exploitation’: growth through domination of the environment (BGE 259, GM II: 12). In animals, power coincides with happiness, while health and decadence track the correspondence between instinct and happiness (TI II: 11). This simple picture is complicated by the Genealogy, where Nietzsche depicts human nature as an animal illness caused by civilization’s disruption of the natural correspondence of instinct and happiness. Civilization shapes this ‘sick animal’ into the distinctly human ‘sovereign individual’ (GM III: 13, II: 2), restoring the harmony of instinct and happiness in an internal hierarchy of drives. So, sovereign individuality is a distinctly human model of health. Although life is exploitation, human health does not coincide with greater environmental power, but rather an internal qualitative expansion of power: greater variety and tension among drives, greater ‘wholeness in diversity’ in the ‘social structure’ of the self (BGE 212, 12). Nonetheless, health is not a moral criterion, but instead the precondition of moral agency. The subordination of drives to a commanding hierarchy grounds the ability to uphold any moral principles at all, to make and keep promises to oneself and others. Moral agency coincides, in turn, with overcoming the source of moral conflict in organic life’s drive for growth. The unification of opposing drives provides pleasure in power over oneself rather than one’s environment, the ‘happiness of high tension’ among drives (BGE 260), and in environmental resistance, a need for ‘equal opponents’ (TI IX: 38, EH 1: 7). Consequently, Nietzsche’s meta-ethical ideal supports a moral pluralism that supports any moral content. Moral conflicts arise precisely to the degree individuals are incapable of achieving moral agency, but they dissolve as moral agency of any kind is more widely achieved. (shrink)

This essay argues that although political thinkers frequently draw on his thought, Friedrich Nietzsche has not been read as a ‘thinker of politics’ in his own regard because the Euro-American field of political thought owes its very notion of ‘politics’ to the conceptual heritage Nietzsche's project directly challenges. The first part of the essay traces the prevailing conception of politics to Aristotle, in whose view politics is the quintessentially human ( anthropos) activity of organising collective life through reason/speech ( (...) logos). The second part presents Nietzsche's project as a novel type of political naturalism, one which replaces the two Aristotelian axioms underpinning standard construals of politics, namely logocentrism and anthropocentrism. For Nietzsche, politics is not a unique, intra-species behaviour of certain bipedal primates, but the relational power dynamics present in all of nature, humans included. Nietzsche's political naturalism thereby gifts us an image of politics befitting the thoroughly entangled, volatile world we urgently have to come to terms with today. (shrink)

This article questions a common reading of Section 230 of Beyond Good and Evil as containing a canonical statement of Nietzsche’s naturalism. The section cannot be read simply as the programmatic statement of an investigative task, and is relatively vague as to its nature. Nietzsche’s aim is aporetic. He presents the naturalist task as involving mental self-cruelty and a struggle with unconscious vanity, suggesting that thinkers have found no way to justify why they choose this task, unless they invoke (...) self-descriptions which are false and belong to a metaphysical conception of truth and inquiry that naturalism must resist. In the Genealogy, Nietzsche revisits this theme and announces his task as that of calling into question these justifications of naturalist inquiry. (shrink)

Virtue Beyond Morality is unique in being a study of Nietzsche’s ethics, that is both well-grounded in Nietzsche studies and draws on a broad knowledge of ethical theory, both historical and contemporary. The book makes Nietzsche’s thought accessible to Anglo-American moral philosophers, and draws on historical and contemporary ethics in a way that illuminates Nietzsche’s concerns.

Nietzsche regarded Thus Spoke Zarathustra as his most important philosophical contribution because it proposes solutions to the problems and questions he poses in his later books – for example, his cure for the human disposition to vengefulness and his creation of new values as the antidote to nihilism. It is also the only place where he elaborates his concepts of the superhuman and the eternal recurrence of the same. In this Critical Guide, an international group of distinguished scholars analyze the (...) philosophical ideas in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, discussing a range of topics that include literary parody as philosophical critique, philosophy as a way of life, the meaning of human life, philosophical naturalism, fatalism, radical flux, human passions and virtues, great politics, transhumanism, and ecological conscience. The volume will be invaluable for philosophers, scholars and students interested in Nietzsche's thought. (shrink)

In this article (1) I extract from Brentano’s works (three) formal arguments against “genealogical explanations” of ethical claims. Such explanation can also be designated as “naturalism” (not his appellation); (2) I counter these arguments, by showing how genealogical explanations of even apodictic moral claims are logically possible (albeit only if certain unlikely, stringent conditions are met); (3) I show how Nietzsche’s ethics meets these stringent conditions, but evolutionary ethics does not. My more general thesis is that naturalism and (...) intuitionism in ethics need not be mutually incompatible. (shrink)

尼采的自然主義或者尼采作為自然主義者可以說是過去二十年英美尼 采學界最為熱門的研究論題之一，而在所有相關作品中，Christian Emden 的《尼采的自然主義》則憑藉其出色的歷史脈絡化工作以及對哲學問題的敏 銳關注而成為尼采研究領域不可忽略的著作。在書中，Emden 在十九世紀早 期新康德主義以及生命科學的脈絡下重構了尼采的自然主義，並認為尼采的 系譜學提供了對規範性的一個自然歷史的詮釋。本文將首先簡介在英美以及 德國學界所展開的對尼采自然主義詮釋的爭論，接著概覽Emden 一書的章 節內容，隨後介紹以及評論此書的核心觀點，最後則以對當代尼采研究的簡 短反思作為結論.

ABSTRACT There is a disagreement over how to understand Nietzsche's view of science. According to what I call the Negative View, Nietzsche thinks science should be reconceived or superseded by another discourse, such as art, because it is nihilistic. By contrast, what I call the Positive View holds that Nietzsche does not think science is nihilistic, so he denies that it should be reinterpreted or overcome. Interestingly, defenders of each position can appeal to Nietzsche's understanding of naturalism (...) to support their interpretation. I argue that Nietzsche embraces a social constructivist conception of causality that renders his naturalism incompatible with the views of naturalism attributed to him by the two dominant readings. (shrink)

This article questions a common reading of Section 230 of Beyond Good and Evil as containing a canonical statement of Nietzsche’s naturalism. The section cannot be read simply as the programmatic statement of an investigative task, and is relatively vague as to its nature. Nietzsche’s aim is aporetic. He presents the naturalist task as involving mental self-cruelty and a struggle with unconscious vanity, suggesting that thinkers have found no way to justify why they choose this task, unless they invoke (...) self-descriptions which are false and belong to a metaphysical conception of truth and inquiry that naturalism must resist. In the Genealogy, Nietzsche revisits this theme and announces his task as that of calling into question these justifications of naturalist inquiry. (shrink)

This paper attempts to show how two seemingly conflictual aspects of Nietzsche's thought, its naturalism and religiosity, can be interpreted as the coherent expression of a religious form of naturalism. A wide range of texts across Nietzsche's corpus are considered and the perspective developed related to contemporary debates within the philosophy of religion. In particular, Nietzsche's thought is shown to provide rich resources for overcoming the 'reductionism/anti-reductionism' dilemma.

Any interpretation of Nietzsche’s criticisms of morality must show whether or not Nietzsche is entitled both to deny free will and to be concerned with furtheringhuman freedom. Here I will show that Nietzsche is entitled to both claims if his theory of freedom is set in the context of a naturalistic drive-psychology. The drive-psychology allows Nietzsche to develop a modified but recognizable account of freedom as autonomy. I situate this development in Nietzsche’s thought through a close reading of Daybreak (Morgenröte). (...) In conclusion I contrast Nietzsche’s naturalistic account of autonomy with the transcendental account developed by Kant. (shrink)

Nietzsche's views on knowledge have been interpreted in at least three incompatible ways - as transcendental, naturalistic or proto-deconstructionist. While the first two share a commitment to the possibility of objective truth, the third reading denies this by highlighting Nietzsche's claims about the necessarily falsifying character of human knowledge (his so-called error theory). This paper examines the ways in which his work can be construed as seeking ways of overcoming the strict opposition between naturalism and transcendental philosophy (...) whilst fully taking into account the error theory (interpreted non-literally, as a hyperbolic warning against uncritical forms of realism). In doing so, it clarifies the nature of Nietzsche's ontological commitments, both in the early and the later work, and shows that his relation to transcendental idealism is more subtle than is allowed by naturalistic interpreters while conversely accounting for the impossibility of conceiving the conditions of the possibility of knowledge as genuinely a priori. (shrink)

This paper analyses the connection between Nietzsche’s early employment of the genealogical method and contemporary neo-pragmatism. The paper has two goals. On the one hand, by viewing Nietzsche’s writings in the light of neo-pragmatist ideas and reconstructing his approach to justice as a pragmatic genealogy, it seeks to bring out an under-appreciated aspect of his genealogical method which illustrates how genealogy can be used to vindicate rather than to subvert, and accounts for Nietzsche’s lack of historical references. On the other (...) hand, by highlighting what Nietzsche has to offer neo-pragmatism, it seeks to contribute to neo-pragmatism’s conception of genealogy. The paper argues that Nietzsche and the neo-pragmatists share a naturalistic concern and a pragmatist strategy in responding to it. The paper then shows that Nietzsche avoids a reductive form of functionalism by introducing a temporal axis, but that this axis should be understood as a developmental model rather than as historical time. This explains Nietzsche’s failure to engage with history. The paper concludes that pragmatic genealogy can claim a genuinely Nietzschean pedigree. (shrink)

There is an emerging consensus in recent literature that Nietzsche adheres to some form of “naturalism,” that his closest philosophical kin are Hume and Darwin rather than Derrida.1 Despite this consensus, however, scholars disagree as to the relationship between Nietzsche’s naturalism and his ethics.2 The most prominent interpretation is that Nietzsche is an ethical naturalist in the Aristotelian tradition. According to this interpretation, the good life for an individual is derived from natural “type-facts” about him.3 Each individual possesses (...) certain natural interests and capacities in virtue of being a member of a type, such that the satisfaction or fulfillment of these needs or capacities amounts to her.. (shrink)

This unique book explores Nietzsche’s philosophy at the time of Dawn’s writing and discusses the modern relevance of themes such as fear, superstition, terror, and moral and religious fanaticism. The authors highlight Dawn’s links with key areas of philosophical inquiry, such as “the art of living well,” skepticism, and naturalism. The book begins by introducing Dawn and discussing how to read Nietzsche, his literary and philosophical influences, his relation to German philosophy, and his efforts to advance his ‘free spirit’ (...) philosophy. Subsequent discussions address a wide range of topics relevant to Dawn, including presumptions of customary morality, hatred of the self, free-minded thinking, and embracing science and the passion of knowledge. (shrink)

Like Kant, the German Idealists, and many neo-Kantian philosophers before him, Nietzsche was persistently concerned with metaphysical questions about the nature of objects. His texts often address questions concerning the existence and non-existence of objects, the relation of objects to human minds, and how different views of objects significantly impact various commitments in many areas of philosophy—not just metaphysics, but also semantics, epistemology, science, logic and mathematics, and even ethics. This book presents a systematic and comprehensive analysis of Nietzsche’s material (...) object metaphysics. Remhof argues that Nietzsche embraces the controversial _constructivist_ view that all concrete objects are socially constructed. Reading Nietzsche as a constructivist, Remhof contends, provides fresh insight into Nietzsche's views on truth, science, naturalism, and nihilism. Remhof investigates how Nietzsche’s view of objects compares with similar views offered by influential American pragmatists, and explores the implications of Nietzsche’s constructivism for debates in contemporary material object metaphysics. _Nietzsche’s Constructivism _is a highly original and timely contribution to the steadily growing literature on Nietzsche’s thought. (shrink)

The topicality of Friedrich Nietzsche’s thought is reflected in his critique of mass culture, society and the state, and scientific methods, which later had a significant impact on modern discourse. Mass culture is the foundation of modern social reality as a force of decadence and nihilism that degrades the authentic and creates a mediocre culture. Nietzsche opposed a “culture” that implies a transcendence and sublimation of “nature” into the forms of “moral” ideals, and he called for a natural life without (...) harmful cultural influences that are an obstacle to a healthy human life. The idea of nihilism present in culture is relevant to our time because it manifests as a loss of depth or meaning in life itself, which, like nature, is chaos, without structure or empirical evidence. To understand the scientific revolution and its impressively devastating pace in the high-tech laboratories of our global research ecosystem, relevant is Nietzsche’s perspective aimed at demystifying science, especially positivism and naturalism, which seek to impose truth based on scientifically verified knowledge. Scientific interpretations and constructions are efforts to control and “humanise” nature by adapting chaos to our anthropomorphic expectations, needs, and concerns and making chaotic nature predictable. The paper shows that Nietzsche’s critique of culturalism and naturalism is based on the vision of the life of the “last man human” who rejects the culture of self-overcoming and dismantles reduces the fear of the uncertain and sudden and lives enframed in reality as presented by the scientific community. In the life of the contemporary human being, the will to live is merely maintained because he lacks the will to power. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Nietzsche’s Critiques: The Kantian Foundations of His ThoughtDaniel SchumanR. Kevin Hill. Nietzsche’s Critiques: The Kantian Foundations of His Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003. Pp. xvi + 242. Cloth, $45.00.This important book presents a broad and systematic study of Kant's influence on Nietzsche. Hill contends that Nietzsche, throughout the course of his philosophical career, wrestled with fundamental ideas presented in all three of Kant's Critiques. In the preliminary chapter, (...) Hill chronicles Nietzsche's familiarity with Kant by briefly examining the nineteenth century interpretations of Kant that Nietzsche was known to have read, namely those of Kuno Fisher, Friedrich Lange, and Schopenhauer. Hill also details Nietzsche's references to Kant throughout the published and unpublished writings, even providing a table that lists the number of references to Kant in five-year increments from 1865 through 1889 (19). Whether or not one agrees with the arguments in the remainder of the book, this first chapter stands alone as a useful historical introduction and reference guide for anyone interested in Kant and Nietzsche in light of early Neo-Kantianism.Chapters 2 and 3 focus upon Nietzsche's early encounter with the Critique of Judgment. Hill offers an interpretation of the third Critique that focuses on the centrality of reflective judgment in that text. The author shows how both aesthetic and teleological judgments are reflective, as opposed to determinative, in the sense that they exemplify ways that the subject is driven to interpret or conceive of the world, e.g., "as if" it were designed (70). He argues that Kant's conception of reflective judgmenthad a significant influence upon Nietzsche's early views on teleology and aesthetics. Hill also proposes that Nietzsche's early published and unpublished writings, including the Birth of Tragedy, are more indebted to Kant's metaphysics and conception of the supersensible, than they are to Schopenhauer's metaphysics of the will. Though Nietzsche retained a conception of the noumenal, Hill argues that he rejected Schopenhauerian determinative judgments about noumena in favor of Kantian reflective judgments similar to those in the third Critique (94).Chapters 4, 5, and 6 of this book deal with Kant's influence on Nietzsche's mature critiques of metaphysics and epistemology. Hill contends that Nietzsche's naturalism and empiricism were a response to, and outgrowth of, a variety of specific metaphysical and epistemological claims made in the first Critique. For example, by focusing on space and time, he compares Kant's transcendental idealism with Nietzsche's naturalism. Hill shows that Nietzsche generally accepted Kant's contention that the spacio-temporal structure of the phenomenal or natural world is "mind-dependent" (127). However, he also proposes that because Nietzsche had access to more advanced empirical theories, he eventually came to the conclusion that Kant's rigid a priori, Euclidian characterization of the phenomenal stands as a "falsified" interpretation of nature (132, 191). Hill contends that while Nietzsche [End Page 503] accepts that nature is a product of the mind, he was also committed to the idea that there may be better or more accurate ways of characterizing nature. In this section of the book, Hill could have done more to clarify how, for Nietzsche, nature is both dependent upon the mind (what Hill labels "panpsychism"), yet still somehow "transcends us" (138). Nonetheless, one does gain from these chapters an appreciation of the influence that Kant's theoretical philosophy had on Nietzsche.The final chapter investigates the ways that the three essays of the Genealogy of Morals confront various aspects of Kant's practical philosophy (Hill does provide evidence that Nietzsche read the second Critique prior to writing the Genealogy [202]). Hill claims Nietzscheian genealogy is employed as an attack upon various aspects of Kant's rational conception of morality, including his dependence upon moral intuition (202, 205, 206). He also details Nietzsche's reaction against Kant's dependence upon the noumenal as the foundation for moral freedom and responsibility (219, 222-29). Nonetheless, Hill finds points of agreement between Kant and Nietzsche on morality. For instance, he argues that Kant and Nietzsche share somewhat similar conceptions of moral agency in the sense that Nietzsche "agrees with Kant's characterization... (shrink)

This essay examines a particular rhetorical strategy Nietzsche uses to supply prima facie epistemic justification: appeals to intuition. I first investigate what Nietzsche thinks intuitions are, given that he never uses the term ‘intuition’ as we do in contemporary philosophy. I then examine how Nietzsche can simultaneously endorse naturalism and intuitive appeals. I finish by looking at why and how Nietzsche uses appeals to intuition to further his philosophical agenda. Answering these questions should provide a deeper understanding of how (...) Nietzsche does philosophy. (shrink)

An incisive exploration of Nietzsche as a bold, visionary poet-philosopher. Today, Nietzsche is justly celebrated for his rich, philosophical naturalism, but Keith Ansell-Pearson warns that we must not overlook the visionary dimension of his thinking and his focus on the need to cultivate a new care of the self and care of life. In Nietzsche's Earthbound Wisdom, Ansell-Pearson recovers Nietzsche's love for a philosophy that guides us through our passions, one that opens us more fully to the (...) possibilities of life and the joy of knowledge. Ansell-Pearson offers close readings of Nietzsche's texts in conversation with philosophical and literary figures including Augustine, Baudelaire, Carlyle, Dostoevsky, Emerson, Flaubert, Stendhal, and more. Throughout, Ansell-Pearson examines Nietzsche's sophisticated critique of literary naturalism and his alternative conception of the poet as a seer who has a deep longing for a new earth. (shrink)

Nietzsche's aims and targets -- Reading Nietzsche's preface -- Naturalism and genealogy -- Selflessness : the struggle with Schopenhauer -- Nietzsche and Paul Rée on the origins of moral feelings -- Good and evil : affect, artistry, and revaluation -- Free will, autonomy, and the sovereign individual -- Guilt, bad conscience, and self-punishment -- Will to power in the Genealogy -- Nietzsche's illustration of the art of exegesis -- Disinterestedness and objectivity -- Perspectival knowing and the (...) affects -- The ascetic ideal, meaning, and truth -- Beyond selflessness. (shrink)

이 글의 주된 목적은 니체의 도덕철학의 규범연관성과 그것의 자연주의적 정당화 가능성을 해명하는 데 있다. 니체는 강력한 도덕 비판자라는 이미지 때문에 오랫동안 비규범적인 인물로 평가받아 왔다. 하지만 니체가 도덕을 비판했다는 사실이 그가 규범적 기획을 포기했거나, 그가 철저하게 비규범적 입장만을 견지했다는 주장의 근거가 되는 것은 아니다. 니체는 누구보다 강한 도덕적 파토스의 소유자였으며, 오히려 그는 매우 다른 관점에서 도덕의 새로운 개념을 위한 토대를 밝히려고 시도했다.BR 니체의 규범적 관점들과 니체에게 귀속되어 왔던 자연주의적 세계관의 연관성을 보여주기 위해 필자는 니체의 도덕철학을 개방적 자연주의의 한 형태로 해석했고, (...) 이 관점에서 라이터와 샤흐트의 논의의 난점을 지적했다. 또한 체험주의적 시각에 의지해서 필자는 니체의 도덕철학이 전통 윤리학의 규범성에 대한 절대주의적 개념을 넘어서는 ‘나쁜 것의 윤리학’의 한 형태로 읽힐 수 있다고 주장했다. ‘나쁜 것의 윤리학’에 따르면 도덕철학의 본질적 과제는 규범적 강제성을 축으로 금지의 영역을 규정하는 데 있다. 이처럼 자연주의적 측면에서 니체 도덕철학의 규범연관성을 밝히는 것은 규범윤리학과 비규범윤리학 사이의 그릇된 이분법을 넘어서는 대안적인 시각에 대한 하나의 새로운 가능성을 제안하게 될 것이다. (shrink)

In his recent discussion of Nietzsche’s naturalism, Brian Leiter invokes examples from the world of plants to demonstrate that human behavior and values are causally determined by “heritable psychological and physiological traits,” or what he also refers to as “type-facts.”1 On this view, Nietzsche’s naturalistic project is concerned with explaining how and why a certain type of person comes to bear certain values and ideas just as “one might come to understand things about a certain type of tree by (...) knowing its fruits.”2 Leiter holds that “just as natural facts about the tree explain the fruit it bears, so too type-facts about a person will explain the ideas and values he comes to bear.”3 Nietzsche views the.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Nietzsche’s Kind of Philosophy: Finding His Way by Richard SchachtRex WelshonRichard Schacht, Nietzsche’s Kind of Philosophy: Finding His Way Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023. xvii + 375 pp. ISBN: 978-0-226-82283-3 (cloth); 978-0-226-82286-0 (e-book). Cloth, $49.00; e-book, $48.99.Over the course of his distinguished career, Richard Schacht has written on alienation, value theory, and philosophical anthropology; he has analyzed the work of Hegel and coauthored a set of reflections (...) on Richard Wagner with Philip Kitcher. He has also recently completed the gigantic task of editing the two-volume Norton Anthology of Western Philosophy After Kant, and he is the sole editor of the set’s second volume, The Norton Anthology of Western Philosophy After Kant: The Interpretive Tradition. Still, for all of these achievements, his most enduring influence on philosophy is likely through his fifty-year-long engagement with the work of Nietzsche, which has produced several books and several dozen articles.Nietzsche’s Kind of Philosophy: Finding His Way is Schacht’s most recent contribution to Nietzsche scholarship. In this book, Schacht investigates the following two-part question: What kind of philosopher was Nietzsche, and what kind of philosophy did he produce? Each of Schacht’s answers reveals a consummate knowledge of Nietzsche’s entire corpus, a comprehensive appreciation of his philosophical project, and a scrupulous appraisal of his philosophical contributions. At once magisterial, scholarly, astute, judicious, congenial, challenging, and occasionally frustrating, Nietzsche’s Kind of Philosophy could have been written only by Schacht, and that is to say, among other things, that it is unique and deserving of praise.Schacht divides Nietzsche’s Kind of Philosophy into two parts. In the six chapters of the first and longer part, he canvases Nietzsche’s philosophical self-discovery following BT and UM. For Schacht, Nietzsche’s philosophical development begins in the latter half of the 1870s, after he resigned his professorship at the University of Basel, and ends with his 1889 collapse. So, after a prologue first chapter in which the challenges of understanding what kind of philosopher Nietzsche strove to become are discussed, Schacht examines, [End Page 232] in turn, 1878’s HH and 1881’s D (chapter 2); 1882’s Joyful Inquiry (GS), Books I–IV (chapter 3); Z, published in installments between 1883 and 1885 (chapter 4); BGE, from 1886, and 1887’s Joyful Inquiry, Book V (chapter 5); and then 1887’s GM and the final works from 1888, TI, CW, The A, and EH (chapter 6). In the second and somewhat shorter part of the book, Schacht allots five successive chapters to consider whether, and in what ways, Nietzsche can be identified as a nihilist, an existentialist, an individualist, a free spirit, and a naturalist.Given its scope, Nietzsche’s Kind of Philosophy cannot be expected to provide, and should not be criticized for not providing, the kind of detailed topical analyses typical of so much Nietzsche scholarship from the past forty years. Indeed, diving deeply into the current scholarly debates is not one of Schacht’s goals. He tells us he is not interested in trying “to read and understand Nietzsche in terms of the conventions in the recent philosophical literature on various matters being debated as though he were a participant in them” (xiv). Rather, he wants to provide a reading of “Nietzsche’s kind of philosophy on its own terms,” as presented by someone who not only has “a lifetime of engagement with Nietzsche’s texts and thought” but also “cares deeply about philosophy and its future, and Nietzsche’s potential importance in that context” (xiv).Interpreting Nietzsche thusly has limitations. After all, the relation between philosophy and its own past is intimate, reflexive, and continuously interpretive, so one might wonder how Schacht proposes to exhibit Nietzsche’s importance to philosophy without understanding how his thought relates to the discipline’s current state or to what its future might yet become. But perhaps this concern is uncharitable; perhaps Schacht’s point is instead an admonishment against thinking too quickly that because Nietzsche was so far ahead of his time and anticipated so much that has... (shrink)

Friedrich Nietzsche's complex connection to Charles Darwin has been much explored, and both scholarly and popular opinions have tended to assume a convergence in their thinking. In this study, Dirk Johnson challenges that assumption and takes seriously Nietzsche's own explicitly stated 'anti-Darwinism'. He argues for the importance of Darwin for the development of Nietzsche's philosophy, but he places emphasis on the antagonistic character of their relationship and suggests that Nietzsche's mature critique against Darwin represents the key (...) to understanding his broader Darwinian position. He also offers an original reinterpretation of the Genealogy of Morals, a text long considered sympathetic to Darwinian naturalism, but which he argues should be taken as Nietzsche's most sophisticated critique of both Darwin and his followers. His book will appeal to all who are interested in the philosophy of Nietzsche and its cultural context. (shrink)