Ridley on "Nietzsche and the Re-Evaluation of Values"

MOVING TO FRONT FROM NOV. 24, 2007, as I recently came across someone referencing this article without noticing the mistakes discussed here.
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The article by Aaron Ridley (Southampton) appeared in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 105 (December 2005): 155-175 (all citations, unless otherwise noted, are to this article).

The paper tackles the problem I dealt with in "Nietzsche's Metaethics: Against the Privilege Readings," European Journal of Philosophy 8 (2000): 277-297 and, in revised and expanded form, in Nietzsche on Morality (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 136-161 (cited hereafter as NOM). Ridley chooses to call it "the authority problem" (172), the problem that "Nietzsche's evaluative standpoint, and the re-evaluation that he undertakes from it, need have no authority for us" to the extent that "we are comfortable with our existing values, and with our existing evaluations of them" (172). Here is how I put it:

[I]n offering a revaluation of morality is Nietzsche doing anything more than giving his idiosyncratic opinion from his idiosyncratic evaluative perspective? Is there, in short, anything about Nietzsche's evaluation of morality that ought to command our attention and assent? (NOM, 137)

I am content to follow Ridley in calling this "the authority problem," since it strikes me as an apt name.

Ridley proceeds into a discussion of "types of value" that is a bit unusual. Although he employs the familiar language of "instrumental" and "intrinsic" value, he defines the latter not as "having value as an end in-itself" (or some similar formulation) but rather in terms of a value's capacity to motivate action. So, he says, a value "is intrinstically valuable with respect to a given way of living if, other things being equal, it can, by itself, motivate." We can allow Ridley this stipulative usage of what might ordinarily have been called some kind of "internalism." I'm not sure this will much matter, but we need to bear in mind his non-standard usage lest the subsequent discussion be confusing.

Ridley emphasizes (176) the point made by Clark and myself in our introduction to the 1997 CUP edition of Daybreak, namely, that in this work he became interested in those cases where morality (or MPS--"morality in the pejorative sense"--in my standard terminology) operated as a genuine motive of action. That means, of course, that in Ridley's terms the revaluation of MPS is the revaluation of an "instrinsic" value.

Ridley then distinguishes five different ways of engaging in a revaluation of an intrinsic value (what he refers to as "V"). The first one he puts as follows (177):

Showing that V, although an intrinsic value, is indirectly instrumental in realising ends said to be bad, although not ends that coudl be acknowledged as bad from the standpoint of the relevant way of living.

This is an unlovely formulation, but I think he is correct in arguing (178-181) that this is the conception of revaluation that I ascribe to Nietzsche. Here is one of the ways I put it:

Nietzsche wants to effect a revaluation of values, that is, a new assessment of the value of our "moral" values. He holds that MPS is not conducive to the flourishing of human excellence and it is by reference to this fact that he proposes to assess the value of MPS. This kind of critical project naturally invites the question: what exactly is the value of the flourishing of human excellence, and why does it trump the values served by MPS (e.g., the preservation of the herd)? (NOM, 136)

Ridley quotes (at 178) a similar passage from pp. 128-129 of NOM. As I document in NOM, there is, of course, a massive amount of textual evidence that versions of this charge--that MPS is an obstacle to the flourishing of human excellence--constitute Nietzsche's central and oft-repeated criticism of the value of MPS (see NOM, 113-114, and n. 1 on 114).

Ridley thinks this construal of revaluation won't do, though not (oddly) because he actually considers any of the textual evidence I cite. (His failure to consider any texts should be the first indication that he is not entitled to claim that my account "is certainly not the main plank of [Nietzsche's] approach [to the revaluation], and it is certainly not the key to understanding Nietzsche's critical project as a whole" [180-181].) Rather, he seems dissatisfied with the resolution to "the authority problem" that I defend. Here is Ridley describing (correctly) my reading of Nietzsche:

The point of Nietzsche's re-evaluation...is simply to "alert 'higher' types to the fact" that traditional morality "is not, in fact, conducive to their flourishing," so that they can wean themselves away from its values and realise their potential for human excellence. The authority problem is thus removed by restricting Nietzsche's audience to those for whom his re-evaluations do have some authority. (180)

Again, Ridley does not feel the need to consider any textual evidence. His argumentive posture appears to be this: since the position I have ascribed to Nietzsche is unappealing and also unstable, it could not be Nietzsche's. It does not occur to him that this wouldn't, actually, be an argument against the interpretation, but we can put that issue to one side in any case, since his objection that the position is "unstable"--that it "collapses at once"--fails.

On my interpretation, Nietzsche thinks that nascent higher human being suffer from a certain kind of false consciousness: they accept as binding on (and good for) them a set of values, namely MPS, that are, in fact, inhospitable to their own flourishing. Nietzsche writes with such rhetorical ferocity, and employs various rhetorical tricks (e.g., inviting his readers to commit the genetic fallacy [cf. NOM 176]), precisely in order to overcome the false consciousness that afflicts the nascent higher human beings.

Ridley's response to this interpretive hypothesis strikes me, I must confess, as bizarre. After quoting my observation "that Nietzsche writes with passion and force [because] he must shake higher types out of their intuitive commitment to the moral traditions of two millenia" (NOM 155), Ridley adds "which rather indicates that the members of Nietzsche's 'proper' audience are not 'predisposed' to accept the authority of his evaluative standpoint after all" (180). But it obviously indicates no such thing: indeed, it is fully consistent with the hypothesis that nascent higher men suffer from false consciousness, which is an impediment to their correctly appreciating what is in their interests. One can obviously be "predisposed" to something, without being well-disposed to it occurrently because of cognitive or other defects. After all a disposition is a tendency to, say, act in a certain way under the right kinds of conditions; the disposition may or may not be activated depending on the conditions. False consciousness is one possible obstacle to realizing the disposition. (There is actually a deeper, but related, puzzle about Nietzsche's naturalism and the thesis that higher types suffer from false consciousness insofar as they embrace MPS that I discuss at 156 ff., but about which Ridley, not surprisingly, is totally silent.)

After his initial non-sequitur (quoted above), Ridley continues:

The fact is that, even on Leiter's reading, Nietzsche needs somehow to reach inside traditional morality, and to address those who, whether through some sort of misunderstanding or not, are intuitively committed to its values; and this is hardly likely to be achieved by merely insisting, against those intuitions, that the values in question are indirectly instrumental in realising ends said (by Nietzsche) to be bad, however heatedly he says it. (180)

This is barely recognizable as a paraphrase of my interpretation, which is all the more surprising given that Ridley had been reasonably good at stating my views up until this point. To start, it conflates the question how Nietzsche proposes to overcome the false consciousness of nascent higher human beings with the question why Nietzsche judges MPS to lack a certain kind of value. To use Ridley's somewhat unlovely formulation: "that the values in question are indirectly instrumental in realising ends said (by Nietzsche) to be bad" is first of all an answer to the latter question, not the former.

And yet it is reasonable to suppose that if nascent higher human beings become convinced that MPS is an obstacle to their own flourishing that they will be motivated by that fact to rethink the value of MPS. This is because the thesis that the flourishing of great human beings has value is different from the thesis that "my flourishing has value," which is what is at issue when a nascent higher man discovers that MPS is, in fact, an obstacle to the flourishing of human excellence. The latter is a judgment of prudential value, and those judgments are, on the account I develop in some detail, necessarily objective judgments (see esp. NOM 106-112). They are also, in Ridley's language, "intrinsic" value judgments or, in my more standard usage, internalist judgments, that is, judgments about value that necessarily have motivational force for persons. (That "X is good" for me means that I care or am capable of caring about realizing X.)

But to overcome the "false consciousness" of nascent higher human beings, Nietzsche will employ a variety of other argumentative and rhetorical moves: for example, he will, fundamentally, exploit the "will to truth" of his readers by exposing the falsity of the metaphysics of agency on which morality depends; and he will encourage them to commit the genetic fallacy, by rejecting a morality whose origin is contemptible by their own lights.

All these points are in NOM, and judging from other critical reaction, rather clear themes in my reconstruction of Nietzsche's critique. Given Ridley's failure to either engage or understand the dialectical structure of Nietzsche's argument as I reconstruct it, it is rather remarkable that he concludes by announcing that Nietzsche's revaluation "is a considerably subtler affair than Leiter acknowledges" (181)! I am here reminded of the comments by Ken Gemes (Birkbeck/Southampton) and Christopher Janaway (Southampton) in their review essay about my book in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (Nov. 2005):

Leiter presents his argument with a high standard of rigour, clarity and scholarship....Nietzsche specialists will disagree with Leiter on various issues; in which case they will need to attend carefully to Leiter's often subtle formulations, and hone their positions against what he actually says rather than easy caricatures of his position. If they do so, they will be surprised by the resilience of his interpretation.

It is a shame that Ridley did not heed this advice of his colleagues.

So what is Ridley's "subtler" version of the revaluation? He identifies (at 177) four other possibilities that certainly occupy logically possible space, though with respect to his possibilities two through four (which he flies through at 181-184), there is not much textual evidence, let alone evidence that they are central to Nietzsche's revaluation of values--so Ridley is appropriately brief with them. It is the fifth formulation to which Ridley is really committed, though its similarity to the first kind of revaluation--the one I treated as central and which Ridley rejected--is striking (Ridley concedes as much at 189). Here they are side-by-side (from 177-178):

1. Showing that V, although an intrinsic value, is indirectly instrumental in
realising ends said to be bad, although not ends that could be acknowledged as
bad from the standpoint of the relevant way of living.

5. Showing that V, although an intrinsic value, or a set of intrinsic values, is indirectly
instrumental in realising ends that can, in principle, be grasped as bad from
the standpoint of the relevant way of living.

So it might seem, now, that the entire difference between the reading I argue for in NOM and Ridley's reading comes down to the question whether or not everyone "in principle" might agree that the "end" that MPS brings about is a "bad" one.

But Ridley does have a different view about what the "bad end" in question is: he thinks it is that the values in question (MPS in my terminology) "mak[es] us obscure to ourselves" and thus "has the effect of inhibiting our capacity to experience ourselves, fully, as agents" (185). The idea that Nietzsche is worried about our capacity to "experience ourselves, fully, as agents" strikes me as not a promising interpretive line, and especially since Nietzsche is clear about the need we have to be obscure to ourselves in order to carry on at all! In any case, I leave to the interested reader to consult 185-189 of Ridley's article to assess for him- or herself the textual evidence. (At 188, GM's "sovereign individual" even makes a brief appearance; it will be a subject for a different day to discuss how a group of very able Nietzsche scholars--at Birkbeck and Southampton--convinced themselves to elevate a contentious reading of one minor passage to the center of Nietzsche's corpus--even good Nietzsche scholars, it seems, have trouble reading him "moraline-free"!)

But let's bracket the question about "bad ends": as Ridley eventually acknowledges, his embrace of the fifth version of revaluation puts him with Schacht and Foot as proponents of what I called the "privileged readings" of Nietzsche's metaethics (and which I critiqued in the EJP article and the book). Ridley offers a fair statement of the similarities and differences between his view and that of the earlier writers:

So the account proposed here has in common with Schacht's and Foot's the highlighting of an evaluative standpoint which is in principle accessible to those who are committed to the values [e.g., MPS] whose value is under scrutiny, and who might therefore come to regard the re-evaluation of those values as authoritative. It differs from Schacht's and Foot's, however, in highlighting a standpoint structured by the values of self-understanding and autonomy.... (191).

That means, of course, that my earlier critique of Schacht and Foot is inapposite against Ridley, since that critique turned on the "standpoint" they defended as privileged. The textual implausibility of Ridley's alternative, however, combined with the superficiality of his purported critique of my construal of revaluation, leaves me unpersuaded.

Huenemann Reviews the Young Biography of Nietzsche

Here. A judicious assessment, it seems to me.

Young's Biography of Nietzsche Reviewed in the NY Times

Several readers have sent along this review; as usual, the Times chooses someone without any relevant competence to review a book related to Nietzsche. But given what a trite intellectual lightweight Fukuyama is, this could have been worse! As a Straussian, Fukuyama hasn't much interest in the actual philosophical details of Nietzsche's moral psychology; he is much keener to talk about the possible "political" implications of Nietzsche's views. Here, alas, he can take advantage of Young's utterly idioscyncratic and implausible view that Nietzsche is a religious communitarian. Thoughts from readers on the review?

"Nietzsche's Moral and Political Philosophy"--New Version on SEP

Here. Changes mainly in the section on Nietzsche's political philosophy, including mention of Shaw.

Help Sought: Looking for a Nietzsche Quote

Nietzsche holds the typical naturalist's view that the correct explanation of the purportedly binding force of norms--epistemic, ethical, even logical--is to be given in entirely psychological terms: it is just that creatures like us "feel" that it would be wrong to believe what is unwarranted, or violate a logical canon. He has a particularly striking comment in this vein psychologizing logic. Might anyone have an idea where? I had thought in Nachlass material, but haven't found it, so perhaps elsewhere.

Many thanks.

New Nietzsche Biography by Julian Young

CUP has just published a new "philosophical biography" of Nietzsche by Julian Young (Wake Forest). It doesn't go quite to the Curt Janz level of mind-numbing detail, but it is certainly a comprehensive biography, like Safranski. Unlike Safranski, Young knows some philosophy and so his interpretive comments are more interesting. Young is the author, of course, of the contrarian but extremely interesting Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art and, more recently, of the less successful and plausible Nietzsche's Philosophy of Religion. It is very nice to have a philosopher with interesting ideas about Nietzsche write a biography. I think this will displace the Safranski volume for those interested in philosophy who want to learn about Nietzsche's life.

Where should a student wanting to work on Nietzsche go for a PhD in Philosophy?

Our earlier poll provides some ideas, but I want to supplement that with some narrative advice, of the kind I would give (and do give) to students.


Among the very top PhD programs in the Anglophone world, there are three viable choices for a student wanting to work on Nietzsche: New York University (with John Richardson and Tamsin Shaw), Princeton University (with Alexander Nehamas) and Stanford University (with Lanier Anderson and Nadeem Hussain). I am not sure how hospitable these places are for students primarily interested in Nietzsche, given the dominant interests of the faculty and most of the students, but they deserve serious attention from prospective students: you will get an excellent philosophical education and you have good philosophers who can serve as advisors with respect to Nietzsche work. NYU, with Beatrice Longuenesse, and Stanford, with Dagfinn Follesdal (part-time), Michael Friedman and Allen Wood, also offer good breadth of coverage in post-Kantian philosophy. Oxford University, another outstanding philosophy faculty, is also worth a look these days: Peter Kail, a leading Hume scholar, is working quite a bit now on Nietzsche. Again, there is the question about how hospitable the environment would be, but there are other Oxford faculty with sympathetic interests related to Nietzsche or other figures in post-Kantian German and French philosophy, like Michael Inwood, Stephen Mulhall, and Katherine Morris.


Among strong, but not very top, PhD programs there are several additional choices I would recommend: Birkbeck College and University College in the University of London system; Brown University; University of California, Riverside; University of Chicago; and University of Warwick. In terms of sheer numbers, and diversity of approaches to Nietzsche, Chicago has the most faculty to offer across various units, and for a student also interested in ancient philosophy and/or wanting wide coverage of 19th- and 20th-century European philosophy, Chicago has a great deal to offer. (Faculty interested in Nietzsche include James Conant and Michael Forster [Philosophy], Robert Gooding-Williams [Political Science], Brian Leiter and Martha Nussbaum [Law], Robert Pippin [Social Thought], and David Wellbery [German].)

Brown is stronger in most contemporary areas of philosophy (with a particularly good group in moral and political philosophy) than Chicago, but has less depth and breadth in post-Kantian philosophy of the 19th- and 20th-centuries. (The key faculty are Charles Larmore and Bernard Reginster.) University of California, Riverside also has a strong group in post-Kantian European philosophy, including Maudemarie Clark (a leading Nietzsche scholar, of course), Pierre Keller, Georgia Warnke, and Mark Wrathall, and UCR also offers solid, sometimes outstanding, coverage, across a range of contemporary areas of philosophical research, as well as in modern philosophy. University of Warwick has been a major up-and-coming department in the U.K. over the last decade, and is now solidly among the top ten U.K. programs. Keith Ansell-Pearson and Peter Poellner are the two main faculty interested in Nietzsche (their approaches are quite different, Poellner's being more likely to appeal to students with philosophy backgrounds), but other faculty do importnat work in Kant and post-Kantian philosophy (Quassim Cassam, Stephen Houlgate, A.D. Smith).


Birkbeck has my good friend Ken Gemes, a very talented philosopher who has supervised a number of students working on Nietzsche, and the Nietzsche scholar Simon May is also around and available to students. Birkbeck's main strength tend to be in contemporary areas of Anglophone philosophy--like philosophy of language, mind and action--but bear in mind that within the U of London system one can also draw on scholars like Sebastian Gardner, Mark Kalderon, and Thomas Stern, who are all interested in Nietzsche, making UCL another good choice.

Boston University, which has strong coverage of 19th-century philosophy, has just appointed Paul Katsfanas (whose Nietzsche work is known to readers of this blog) to a tenure-track position. BU thus deserves to be on the map for students thinking about graduate work on Nietzsche. Finally, University of Southampton, though not a strong department overall, is attractive for a student interested in Nietzsche, with Christopher Janaway and Aaron Ridley in Philosophy, and David Owen in Politics.

Audio and Video of Keynote Sessions of the "Nietzsche on Mind and Nature" Conference at Oxford in September...

...are now available.

Clarence Darrow on Nietzsche

This is from his famous summation by defense attorney Clarence Darrow, arguing against the death penalty for Nathaniel Leopold and Richard Loeb, two precocious teenagers who murdered another boy to show that they could do it. Leopold claimed inspiration from Nietzsche. Here is Darrow on Leopold:

He became enamored of the philosophy of Nietzsche. Your Honor, I have read almost everything that Nietzsche ever wrote. He was a man of a wonderful intellect; the most original philosopher of the last century. Nietzsche believed that some time the superman would be born, that evolution was working toward the superman. He wrote one book, Beyond Good and Evil, which was a criticism of all moral codes as the world understands them; a treatise holding that the intelligent man is beyond good and evil, that the laws for good and the laws for evil do not apply to those who approach the superman. He wrote on the will to power. Nathan Leopold is not the only boy who has read Nietzsche. He may be the only one who was influenced in the way that he was influenced.

At seventeen, at sixteen, at eighteen, while healthy boys were playing baseball or working on the farm, or doing odd jobs, Babe [Leopold's nickname] was reading Nietzsche, a boy who never should have seen it, at that early age.

Nietzsche held a contemptuous, scornful attitude to all those things which the young are taught as important in life; a fixing of new values which are not the values by which any normal child has ever yet been reared. Nietzsche's attitude is but a philosophical dream, containing more or less truth, that was not meant by anyone to be applied to life.

Nietzsche says, "The morality of the master class is irritating to the taste of the present day because of its fundamental principle that a man has obligation only to his equals; that he may act to all of lower rank and to all that are foreign, as he pleases."

In other words, man has no obligations; he may do with all other men and all other boys, and all society, as he pleases. The superman was a creation of Nietzsche.

The supermanlike qualities lie not in their genius, but in their freedom from scruple. They rightly felt themselves to be above the law. What they thought was right, not because sanctioned by any law, beyond themselves, but because they did it. So the superman will be a law unto himself What he does will come from the will and superabundant power within him.

Here is a boy at sixteen or seventeen becoming obsessed with these doctrines. There isn't any question about the facts. Their own witnesses tell it and every one of our witnesses tell it. It was not a casual bit of philosophy with him; it was his life. He believed in a superman. He and Dickie Loeb were the supermen. There might have been others, but they were two, and two chums. The ordinary commands of society were not for him.

Many of us read this philosophy but know that it has no actual application to life; but not he. It became a part of his being. It was his philosophy. He lived it and practiced it; he thought it applied to him, and he could not have believed it excepting that it either caused a diseased mind or was the result of a diseased mind.

Here is a boy who by day and by night, in season and out, was talking of the superman, owing no obligations to anyone; whatever gave him pleasure he should do, believing it just as another man might believe a religion or any philosophical theory.

You remember that I asked Dr. Church about these religious cases and he said, "Yes, many people go to the insane asylum on account of them," that "they place a literal meaning on parables and believe them thoroughly"? I asked Dr. Church, whom again I say I believe to be an honest man, and an intelligent man, I asked him whether the same thing might be done or might come from a philosophical belie£ and he said, "If one believed it strongly enough."

And I asked him about Nietzsche. He said he knew something of Nietzsche, something of his responsibility for the war, for which he perhaps was not responsible. He said he knew something about his doctrines. I asked him what became of him, and he said he was insane for fifteen years just before the time of his death. His very doctrine is a species of insanity.

Here is a man, a wise man, perhaps not wise, but a brilliant, thoughtful man who has made his impress upon the world. Every student of philosophy knows him. His own doctrines made him a maniac. And here is a young boy, in the adolescent age, harassed by everything that harasses children, who takes this philosophy and believes it literally. It is a part of his life. It is his life. Do you suppose this mad act could have been done by him in any other way? What could he have to win from this homicide?

A boy with a beautiful home, with automobiles, a graduate of college, going to Europe, and then to study law at Harvard; as brilliant in intellect as any boy that you could find; a boy with every prospect that life might hold out to him; and yet he goes out and commits this weird, strange, wild, mad act, that he may die on the gallows or live in a prison cell until he dies of old age or disease.

He did it, obsessed of an idea, perhaps to some extent influenced by what has not been developed publicly in this case-perversions this case were present in the boy. Both signs of insanity, both, together with this act, proving a diseased mind..

Is there any question about what was responsible for him?

What else could be? A boy in his youth, with every promise that the world could hold. out before him, wealth and position and intellect, yes, genius, scholarship, nothing that he could not obtain, and he throws it away, and mounts the gallows or goes into a cell for life. It is too foolish to talk about. Can Your Honor imagine a sane brain doing it? Can you imagine it coming from anything but a diseased mind? Can you imagine it is any part of normality? And yet, Your Honor, you are asked to hang a boy of his age, abnormal, obsessed of dreams and visions, a philosophy that destroyed his life,
when there is no sort of question in the world as to what caused his downfall. I know, Your Honor, that every atom of life in all this universe is bound up
together. I know that a pebble cannot be thrown into the ocean without disturbing every drop of water in the sea. I know that every life is inextricably mixed and woven with every other life. I know that every influence, conscious and unconscious, acts and reacts on every living organism, and that no one can fix the blame. I know that all life is a series of infinite chances, which sometimes result one way and sometimes another. I have not the infinite wisdom that can fathom it, neither has any other human brain. But I do know that if back of it is a power that made it, that power alone can tell, and if there is no power then it is an infinite chance which man cannot solve.

Why should this boy's life be bound up with Frederick Nietzsche, who died thirty years ago, insane, in Germany? I don't know. I only know it is. I know that no man who ever wrote a line that I read failed to influence me to some extent. I know that every life I ever touched influenced me, and I influenced it; and that it is not given to me to unravel the infinite causes and say, "This is I, and this is you." I am responsible for so much; and you are responsible for so much. I know that in the infinite universe everything has its place and that the smallest particle is a part of all. Tell me that you can visit the wrath of fate and chance and life and eternity upon a nineteen-year-old boy! If you could, justice would be a travesty and mercy a fraud.

Leopold was not, obviously, a good reader of Nietzsche, and Darrow is, of course, not engaged in Nietzsche scholarship, but trying to make the case for sparing the boys from the death penalty on account of psychological disturbance. Still, as popular readings of Nietzsche go, this one may have had more influence than most. Thoughts from readers?

Best Philosophical Articles/Books of the Decade

Readers can contribute their nominations here. Make sure to use a full name when you submit your comment. Let's make sure good articles/books related to Nietzsche and German philosophy more generally are represented. It was a pretty good decade in that regard, or so it seems to me.

More on "Nietzsche Source"

Here, a presentation recorded at the FNS meeting at Oxford this past September. (Thanks to Rob Sica for the link.) The keynote addresses were also recorded, and should be on-line before too long. I'll post a link when they are.

The Continental Traditions in Philosophy vs. "Party Line Continentalists"

A brave, anonymous soul posted the following nonsense on the thread about "Myths about Nietzsche," but it represents such a pernicious and widespread bit of self-deception that it warrants its own post. Our commenter begins:

This was an interesting talk, but I was saddned to hear Leiter take a snipe at the Postmodernists.

I did not take a "snipe" at postmodernism, I expressed a scholarly opinion, namely, that many postmodernist readers of Nietzsche (like Derrida and in a different way Foucault) misunderstand his views on truth and knowledge, in part because they rely too much on material Nietzsche did not publish, which expresses views it appears he rejected over time. This is, if anything, the consensus view in the scholarly community. But it is not a snipe. The anonymous author does not even address the scholarly issue. This is minor (though revealing), since the really good stuff is coming:

Like many Analytics, Leiter's attitude towards the Continentals (and especially towards the Postmodernists) is of barely concealed contempt. With few exceptions, Analytics tend to reduce the thought of their Continental/Postmodernist foes to easily dismissed, facile generalizations, instead of sincerely engaging in dialogue. Of course, the same could be said of many Continentals and Postmodernists, in regards to their attitude towards the Analytics. Much of the time the Analytics and Continentals really seem to be talking past one another.

I am not an "analytic." I do not even know what that means. I can certainly tell you the basics of Quine and Kripke, though I've read relatively little David Lewis; I think metaethics deals with important philosophical problems, but find most Anglophone normative theory embarrassing; I could give you a short lecture on the Gettier problem and the responses to it, but I think "analytic metaphysics" is a seriously wrong turn in the field and ignore it. I can also tell you the basics about Habermas, though I am not a fan and much prefer Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse; I think Derrida is a charlatan, and am sorry to see Foucault, whom I think is the most interesting diagnostician of the 'iron cage' of modernity since Weber, associated with him so often; I agree with Deleuze that phenomenology is our "modern scholasticism," but have a soft spot for Sartre. I enjoy Hume and Nietzsche, Spinoza and Marx, but haven't much affection for Leibniz or Hegel.


I am interested in philosophy and philosophical problems that crop up in various traditions, but often have an interest and existence that transcends them. But why is it so important to cabin me off as an "analytic" in contrast to the "Continentals" (who are then, wholly bizarrely, equated with Postmodernists by our commenter)? Who are these "Continentals"? If I have written extensively on Nietzsche, occasionally on Marx and Foucault; if I have taught Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault, Adorno, and Horkheimer with some frequency; if I have co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy, and I am not a "Continental," then who is?

As I have noted before--and as The Oxford Handbook, I think, reflects--we are living in a Golden Age for scholarship on European philosophy after Kant. Someone who thinks there is a lot of "talking past one another" going on can't, obviously, be talking about the current state of scholarship on figures like Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty--so what is the commenter talking about? Who are these mysterious "Continentals" since they are not me, Michael Rosen, Taylor Carman, Frederick Beiser, Peter Poellner, Sebastian Gardner, Julian Young, Raymond Geuss, Michael Forster, or any of the others working on and in various Continental traditions of philosophy?

As any actual scholar knows, there is no such thing as a "Continental tradition" in philosophy; rather, as Rosen and I noted in the introduction to The Oxford Handbook,

[P]hilosophy in Continental Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is best understood as a connected weave of traditions, some of which overlap, but no one of which dominates all the others. So, for example, German Idealism marks the immediate reception and criticism of Kant's philosophy in figures like Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, who use a comprehensive conception of reason to provide connected answers to a broad range of questions of metaphysics, epistemology, and the theory of value. The breakdown of the German Idealist view was, in turn, of central importance in motivating Marx, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and, more indirectly, Nietzsche. The reactions against Hegel's Idealism in the decades after his death in 1831 were, in fact, manifold; they included: (1) the German Materialism of the 1850s and 1860s in writers like Buchner, Moleschott, Czolbe, and Vogt (though with resonances in better-known philosophical figures like Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche), who took seriously the development of modern physiology, and advocated...the replacement of philosophy by science; (2) Marx's own repuditation of the domain of philosophy as the attempt to establish doctrines in metaphysics and
epistemology in favor of a political, critical and scientistic conception of philosophical method; and (3) the emergence of neo-Kantian thought in the latter years of the nineteenth century (e.g., Lotze, Helmholtz, Fischer, Cohen, Windelband, and Rickert) as a response to the emergence of psychology as a scientific discipline ...

Most of the major twentieth-century developments in "Continental" philosophy can, in turn, be seen as responses to one or more of the nineteenth-century philosophical currents. Inasmuch as there is a Marxist tradition in philosophy, for example, it is marked by a dissatisfication with Marx's professed ideal of a scientific, historical approach to the study of society from which all philosophical questions have been purged, a dissatisfaction expressed in figures like Lukacs, Gramsci, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and, finally, Habermas, who returns Kantian-style questions about justification to center stage. (The analytical Marxists in Anglophone philosophy end up, arguably, with a similar dissatisfaction.) Modern Phenomenology arose, like neo-Kantianism, in reaction to the development of modern psychology, in particular the attempt to reduce issues regarding the nature of thought, meaning, and logic to questions to be answered by an empirical scientific investigation of the facts of mental life....In the hands of Heidegger, however, the tradition is importantly transformed, with a new emphasis on the relationship between structures of meaning and the lived experience of particular individuals that inspired the French Existentialists (like Camus and Sartre) in their belief in the priority of 'existrence' over 'essence.'

Other important developments associated with Continental Europe in the twentieth-century do not map neatly on to the story sketched so far. The philosophical tradition we associate with 'Hermeneutics,' for example, which asserts the centrality and distinctiveness of interpretation for any understanding of language (and, hence, of human beings in whose lives language plays a constitutive role), intersects with both the German Idealist and the Phenomenological traditions and brings to them a distinctive set of issues regarding the relationship between language and thought, the nature of historical and social understanding, and the essential finitude of human
understanding, issues that are manifest in hermeneutically minded writers from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, including, Herder, Schleiermacher, Dilthey, and Gadamer.

So, too, 'Structuralism' was a movement initially not in philosophy, but in linguistics and the social sciences--associated with figures like Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Althusser, and others--which placed emphasis on the explanatory autonomy of systems in contrast to psychological, historical, or teleological explanations. But once this idea was imported into philosophy and psychology itself (for instance, by Lacan and Foucault) the consequence took the form of the so-called 'death of the subject' out of which in turn the tendencies known as 'post-structuralism' and 'post-modernism' emerged (in figures like Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault again). In its most radical forms--informed by Heidegger and one (contentious) reading of Nietzsche--post-structurlism is best understood as a modern form of skepticism,
calling into question not just the possibility of objective truth but of determinate understanding.

This brief, introductory survey of positions, doctrines, and thinkers found on the European Continent after Kant should make clear that any unqualified talk of "Continental" as a kind of philosophy (a doctrine, a method, a set of problems) is ludicrous.

So what's really going on here when people, like the anonymous commenter (but many others, of course), speak of "Continental" or "Continentalists"? For sake of clarity and accuracy, we should really call this sociological phenomenon "Party Line Continentalism" since what it actually picks out is a political effort to enforce a certain philosophical orthodoxy, namely, that which arises from a conception of philosophy and its methods that is largely fixed by Heideggerian phenomenology and developments in mostly French philosophy that involve reactions to Heidegger (such as Derrida, but not only him). Since phenomenology, as it began with Husserl, has much in common with the origins of mid-20th-century analytic philosophy in Frege, there is, shall we say, a certain irony in demarcating the philosophical terrain this way, but it is especially ludicrous to denominate phenomenology-plus-poststructuralism "Continental" given that it effectively excludes the Frankfurt School, Marxism, German Idealism, and Nietzsche from the Continentalist camp. (Of course, that is not how the Party Line Continentalists understand what's going on here, but this is at least partly because their command of the history of European philosophy after Kant is often quite weak and idiosyncratic.)

Party Line Continentalists are very exercised about the fact that there are philosophical scholars of the Continental traditions who treat the figures of post-Kantian European philosophy as philosophers, without reading them through the lens and the methods of Heidegger and/or post-structuralism. Heidegger and (most) of the post-structuralists (Deleuze is an exception) were not, however, very good scholars or philosophical expositors, so it is not surprising that those with real training in philosophy and its history would not read the great figures of the Continental traditions in accord with the Party Line.


Now back to our anonymous commenter, who clearly is in the grips of Party Line Continentalists:

It's good that some of the Analytics are finally starting to get exposed to and grapple with some of the early Continentals, like Neitzsche and Heidegger. But, unfortunately, I think many of those Analytics either completely miss the point that the early Continentals are trying to make, or (worse) try to co-opt them in to the Analytic fold. I think the former is the case with Leiter, when he dismisses Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a mere parody.

It is indicative of the intellectual level of too many Party Line Continentals that they are such careless readers and listeners. I did not, in the interview, dismiss Zarathustra as a parody; I pointed out, rather, that Zarathustra is a parody of the Christ-figure (how could this not be obvious?), and the book a parody of The New Testament, with Zarathustra "preaching" an anti-Christian doctrine. I then pointed out that any careful interpretation of Zarathustra has to be alert to the parodic form, and thus careful in attributing what Zarathustra says to Nietzsche--a hermeneutic consideration especially relevant to appraising the meaning and significance of the image of the Overman.


"Analytic" philosophy as a substantive research program has been moribund for forty years or more, yet Party Line Continentalists know so little about the history of even recent philosophy, that they continue to think that there must be Party Line Analytics lined up against them. In fact, it is the entire history of philosophy and almost every major philosophical tradition prior to that launched by Heideggerian phenomenology that is lined up "against them," which is no doubt why Party Line Continentalists are so intent on misappropriating the term "Continental" for their sect and excluding other philosophers and scholars engaged with the Continental traditions from the Party.


Like most philosophers engaged with the Continental traditions in this Golden Age of philosophical scholarship, I am happy to be excluded from the Party. But I am not happy to see the Party Line discredit the philosophical figures I care about by associating them with their sectarian Party Line. But Party Line Continentalism has no business appropriating the name of a place that is the home to such a rich and philosophically interesting array of thinkers, most of whom do not have the all-too-common vices of the Party Line, such as obscurantism, careless reading, dialectical feebleness, and often ignornance of the history of philosophy.

The good news here is that Party Line Continentalism is, ironically enough, increasingly just an Anglophone phenomenon, confined to a handful of departments in the U.S. (e.g., Penn State, Stony Brook, DePaul, Memphis, Vanderbilt, the New School, Dusquesne), the U.K. (e.g., Middlesex and Dundee), and Australia (e.g., New South Wales). (Even these Party Line Continentalist departments are increasingly diverse, which is a welcome development!) On the European Continent itself, Party Line Continentalism is in retreat almost everywhere, as rigorous historical scholarship, that transcends national boundaries, and Anglophone-style philosophical work is increasingly dominant.

I am genuinely hopeful that over the next generation Party Line Continentalists will be exiled entirely to literature departments, where lack of real depth in philosophy and its history does not matter. If, in addition, some of the unfortunate "fads" in Anglophone philosophy--and the trivial intellectual parochialism that often accompanies them--do not intervene, then we may really enter a period of philosophical scholarship in the Anglophone world in which "analytic" and "Continental" as terms of partisan battle are largely uintelligible to those drawn to the problems of philosophy.

UPDATE: Needless to say, comments are more likely to appear if signed.

Nietzsche on Wikipedia

Maybe some ambitious and web-savvy readers can clean up the Nietzsche entries, which are pretty bad!

Revised and Penultimate Draft of "Who is the 'Sovereign Individual?' Nietzsche on Freedom" Now On-Line

Here. It incorporates in the footnotes several references to the very illuminating, but so far unpublished, paper by Donald Rutherford (UC San Diego) on Nietzsche, Spinoza, and the Stoics and their conceptions of freedom, about which I'll write some more before too long.

Clark and Dudrick on BGE 19

Rob Sica and another correspondent (whose name I'm now forgetting, sorry!) had asked about my reply to Clark and Dudrick's reading of BGE 19 in the Gemes & May volume, in which they critique my reading in "Nietzsche's Theory of the Will." I have added a long footnote to the penultimate version of the paper on "Who is the Sovereign Individual?" (which should be on-line in a day or two) about their paper. I post that footnote here. I may write more about this on another occasion, but for those who might be interested:

Clark & Dudrick (2009) challenge my reading of BGE 19, and so I should say something briefly about why I find their alternative unpersuasive. The crux of their argument is to deem Nietzsche’s “phenomenology [of willing] simply implausible” (251), which then opens the door for them to re-read the passage as limited to “actions performed in opposition to temptation,” and thus as implicating “one’s commitments or values” (251). This reading, alas, finds no support in the text at all, and is motivated entirely by the claim that as a phenomenology of willing simpliciter, Nietzsche’s account is implausible, and so must be read otherwise. I do not find the account implausible (phenomenology does require careful introspection!), but even if one concurred with Clark & Dudrick about this, it would not follow that the passage has a meaning not to be found in the text: perhaps it is just bad phenomenology. But the evidence that Nietzsche holds the view of the will I attribute to him (Leiter 2007) is overwhelming, and BGE 19 as I read it fits nicely with the view that Nietzsche articulate elsewhere in his work (Clark and Dudrick confine their attention to this BGE passage). Curiously, Clark & Dudrick make an
issue (251 n. 3) out of my translation of “ich bin frei, ‘er’ muss gehorchen” as “I am free, ‘it’ must obey” instead of “he” must obey. While Kaufmann follows Clark & Dudrick on this point, Judith Norman (in the Cambridge edition) translates it as I do (“it”), and she is surely right to do so, for contrary to Clark & Dudrick’s claim that there is “no masculine noun in the passage for which the masculine pronoun substitutes,” it is, I would have thought, obvious in context that the “er” that obeys is the body (der Körper), which of course is a masculine noun.

"Nietzsche on Mind and Nature" Conference Sept. 11-13

I wanted to write a few comments about the conference--or about the portion of it I managed to attend. For a variety of reasons, my stay in Oxford was a bit compressed, so I missed some of the keynotes that I would have liked to have heard (like Bernard Reginster's, Peter Poellner's and John Richardson's), and also some papers I would have liked to discuss, like Allison Merrick's on "historical sense" in Nietzsche, and Joao Constancio's on "Nietzsche on Freedom and the Unchangeability of Character." (Joao's paper is an interesting critique of my views in the "The Paradox of Fatalism and Self-Creation in Nietzsche" paper, and we had a useful discussion of it in the St. Peter's College bar; he's kindly sent it to me, and hopefully it will be generally available before long at which point we may discuss it here.)

It was very nice to meet in person a number of Nietzsche scholars, including some who regularly contribute comments here, like Charlie Huenemann and Timothy McWhirter. Because the quality of the papers was unusually high for an FNS event, there were, alas, a lot of conflicts. So while moderating a session which included Rex Welshon's illuminating discussion of Nietzsche and the neurosciences of consciousness and Peter Kail's (as always) masterful explication of Nietzsche's naturalism, I had to miss several papers I would have liked to hear in other sessions. So it goes. I did get to hear later Mario Brandhorst's paper on "Naturalism, Genealogy, and the Value of Morality," and due to some confusion about whether the other speakers for that session were there, we managed to have enough time to have a fruitful dialogue about it in Q&A. I caught some, but not all, of Gabriel Zamosc's very provocative argument about autonomy, sovereignty, and guilt. Galen Strawson gave a tour de force keynote on "Nietzsche's Metaphysics," though one that left a number of us wondering what this metaphysical Nietzsche has to do with Nietzsche the brilliant moral psychologist. My own plenary session led to a number of useful questions (and some naughty behavior by my dear friend Ken Gemes, with whom I've quarrelled about this topic for years now), though I am most indebted to Peter Kail for pointing out to me the need to tackle Spinoza--which led me, in turn, to this very good paper by Donald Rutherford, which I hope to discuss before long. (Rutherford, it seems to me, makes a stronger case for N's positive view of freedom, and its philosophical pedigree, than any of the recent contributors to the Gemes & May volume, so I hope he will publish it before too long. He did kindly give me permission to cite it in the final version of my own "sovereign individual" paper, which I'll have on-line before too long.)

Perhaps the philosophical highlight of the conference, though, wasn't on the official program: disputing at 4 in the morning in the St. Peter's College faculty lounge, with obligatory amounts of 'beverage,' whether or not David Wiggins had a good objection to projectivism with Peter Kail, Allison Merrick, and Christopher Sykes.

My congratulations to Peter Kail and Manuel Dries for organizing one of the best FNS events by everyone's appraisal. Others in attendance are welcome to add their comments on particularly notable papers, discussions, etc.

Myths about Nietzsche

I discuss them on Philosophy Bites. They are: the overman is a central idea in his philosophy; will to power is central to his philosophy; Nietzsche is a proto-postmodernist; and Nietzsche is an anti-semite.

I'm sure various Nietzsche scholars will disagree that these are all myths, but such is life in Nietzsche studies!

Who is the "Soverign Individual"? Nietzsche on Freedom

Sorry not to have gotten the draft of my paper for the FNS meeting at Oxford on-line before I left, but here it is. One serious lacuna in the current version (as Peter Kail rightly pointed out to me) is the failure to discuss Spinoza. But other comments are welcome, and soon, as I have to submit the final version by the end of the month for the Cambridge Critical Guide to the Genealogy.

In the discussion session, John Richardson (NYU) suggested that one familiar sense of freedom--not being subjected to the will of another--is in fact important for Nietzsche. I agreed that that sense of freedom is not a revisionary one, but I don't see the textual evidence that when Nietzsche writes about "freedom" it is this that he has in mind. Reader thoughts on this issue are also especially welcome.

I was sorry not to have been able to attend more of the FNS conference, which was an unusually good one, for which thanks and credit go to Peter Kail and Manuel Dries. I'll try to write a bit more about the conference by the weekend.

Abstracts for Papers at FNS Meeting at Oxford Next Week are Now Available

Here. I will post a draft of my own paper on SSRN before I depart for the conference. I also understand that the keynote sessions are likely to be filmed.

Announcing "Nietzsche Grid"

Carlos Ruiz (who uses the pen name Narziss), a student at Berkeley, has put together "Nietzsche Grid", which is potentially a very useful resource, but it also needs input from other Nietzsche students. The idea is to collect references to sections of the corpus that address various themes in his work. Narziss is also maintaining a blog for discussion and suggestions. I corresponded with Narziss about some possible thematic categories, but I am sure he would welcome input from readers of this blog about categories and ultimately about texts that belong under each category.

David Rosenthal on Consciousness

This useful summary of a recent paper by Rosenthal makes clear why students of Nietzsche should want to study Rosenthal's work on consciousness.

What is "the Kantian ethics/epistemology/metaphysics/aesthetics grid"?

Dana Villa is a political theorist in the Political Science Department at the University of Notre Dame. In a review essay of some recent books on Nietzsche, he concludes with the following statement:

Nietzsche’s critique [of Christian-bourgeois civilization], however, fails to fit the Kantian ethics/epistemology/metaphysics/aesthetics grid—the very grid that
guides the analytic re-constructor. The result is that even the best analytic
Nietzsche literature (and Reginster’s book certainly falls into that category)
will tend to leave out the essential.

"Analytic" is, of course, a code word for a commentator who knows some philosophy and treats Nietzsche as a philosopher who has arguments and evidence. But put that to one side: what sense can be given to "the Kantian ethics/epistemology/metaphysics/aesthetics grid" such that it is true that, for example, Reginster or me is committed to it, and that in virtue of that, are missing something "essential"? The answer may be (as I suspect) no sense at all, and that like talk of "analytic" this is really just code for something else. But what?

Signed comments only.

Nietzsche's Philosophy of Action

This is the penultimate draft of an essay for The Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Action being edited by Timothy O'Connor and Constantine Sandis, that should be out in 2010. I am still working on the issues here (and have worked on them previously, as some readers will recognize), and welcome comments--especially since there were significant space constraints in this piece, which will be less of a factor in the work-in-progress on these themes.

Draft Program for "Nietzsche on Mind and Nature" at Oxford This September Now Available

Here. A lot of interesting stuff, though I regret I am probably going to miss the Friday sessions. Abstracts are not available yet; I'll post a link when they are.

Two New Books on Nietzsche: One Introductory, One for Scholars and Advanced Students

The introductory volume is Charlie Huenemann's Nietzsche: Genius of the Heart, which he kindly sent me. I've been dipping in and out of different parts of it, and it is written in an inviting way for the novice but at the same time is clearly better-informed about recent scholarly literature than most introductions to Nietzsche. Signed comments from readers who have read more of the book are welcome.


The other is the edited volume by Ken Gemes and Simon May on Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy. All the essays are, I believe, new, except my "Nietzsche's Theory of the Will," which has appeared elsewhere. My contribution is unique in another way too in this volume, since it is, I believe, the only one to defend the view that Nietzsche denies the causality of the will, thus denies the autonomy or freedom of the will, and thus denies that people are in any meaningful sense free or morally responsible. The other contributors are Sebastian Gardner, Ken Gemes, Christopher Janaway, Robert Pippin, Simon May, John Richardson, Peter Poellner, Aaron Ridley, David Owen, Mathias Risse, and Maudemarie Clark & David Dudrick. The "Birkbeck-Southampton" axis and its fascination with the "sovereign individual" looms large here; Gemes's paper is probably the best representative of this moralized reading of Nietzsche in the volume, and I will have more to say about it in papers I'm working on. But Clark & Dudrick offer a detailed response to my "Nietzsche's Theory of the Will" paper, Poellner's paper develops a very different (from the Birkbeck-Southampton axis) line about Nietzsche's idea of freedom, Gardner develops his "transcendental" reading of Nietzsche on the self (which is both hugely stimulating and suggestive and yet hugely implausible to my mind), while Risse examines the idea of eternal recurrence through a Freudian lens (Risse's paper is most removed from the main themes of the volume). I will probably write more about the Clark & Dudrick and Poellner papers later this summer as well. Only Katsafanas, of important writers on this topic, is absent from the volume, though his work is much discussed by contributors. In sum, I'm hopeful that this volume, together with the forthcoming Oxford FNS conference on related themes, will lead to some real philosophical progress on these issues in the next few years. (Of course, my hope is that the moralizing readings of Nietzsche will be decisively defeated, but we'll see!)

Again, signed reader comments on the essays in the Gemes & May volume are also welcome.

Riverside and 1st Annual Magnus Lecture by Maudemarie Clark

Last Saturday's event was quite instructive and rewarding, at least for me, though I think others too. Maudemarie Clark offered a new, close reading of section 21 of Beyond Good and Evil, rejecting her earlier claim from Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy that the skepticism about causation in that passage manifests his continued acceptance of the NeoKantian view that "cause" is a concept we impose upon our experience, and so not a feature of the world as it is in-itself. Instead, Clark argued, the passage manifests an essentially Humean view of causation, which is central to making sense of the reasons he gives for rejecting the idea of "unfree will" in the second half of the passage.

The reading was quite ingenious and provocative, but both Lanier Anderson and I were not convinced (though Anderson agreed with Clark that Nietzsche is something like a compatibilist about free will). We argued, in slightly different ways, that Clark had it right in the 1990 book, that the inescapably Kantian language--"'cause' and 'effect' are pure concepts," "in the 'in-itself' there is nothing of 'causal connections'"--does indeed reflect a NeoKantian (Langean) skepticism about the status of claims about cause and effect. Against the Humean reading, Anderson made I thought the particularly telling point that even in BGE 21 Nietzsche identifies the concept of "sequence" as one we impose upon experience, rather than part of the noumenal world. But "sequence" of course is precisely what Humeans claim is delivered by experience, so allegedly the opposite of a conceptual imposition that structures experience!

At this point, Clark's paper is not slated for publication, though I expect some of these arguments will make their way into hers and David Dudrick's forthcoming book on Beyond Good and Evil. I will probably make use of some of the material from my comments on Clark, and my comments on Gemes and Poellner from last year's Pacific APA session on Nietzsche on freedom, in two essays I'm working on currently: the entry on Nietzsche for the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to Philosophy of Action and my essay for the September "Nietzsche and Mind" conference of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society at Oxford, which will be on the topic, "Who is Nietzsche's 'Sovereign Individual'? Nietzsche on Freedom and Agency," which will eventually end up in the CUP volume on the Genealogy that Simon May is preparing. One or both of these will make it on to SSRN in draft, at which point I'll solicit feedback here.

Bottom line, though, on Riverside was that it was a real treat to participate in such a serious and high-level discussion of Nietzsche. I learned a lot.

"Bernd Magnus Lecture" at UC Riverside by Maudemarie Clark, May 30th

I hope to see some readers there:


The First Annual Lecture in
The Bernd Magnus Lecture Series
Saturday, May 30th

Featured Speakers and Commentators:
The inaugural lecture will be given by Maudemarie Clark (UC Riverside) with commentary from Brian Leiter (University of Chicago) and Lanier Anderson (Stanford University)

University of California, Riverside——HMNSS 1500

Conference Schedule
· 1:00: Welcome by John Fischer
· 1:30: Maudemarie Clark: ‘Nietzsche on Causality and Responsibility’
· 2:30: Break
· 2:45: Brian Leiter
· 3:15: Lanier Anderson’
· 3:45: Break
· 4:00: Q&A Session

For more information, please contact Mark Wrathall (mark.wrathall@ucr.edu)

"Nietzsche and Morality" Now Out in Paperback

I got my actual copies today, though Amazon reports not having it in stock yet, but it should be enroute. The volume contains original essays by Simon Blackburn, Maudemarie Clark & David Dudrick, Thomas Hurka, Nadeem Hussain, Christopher Janaway, Joshua Knobe & Brian Leiter, Peter Poellner, Bernard Reginster, Mathias Risse, Neil Sinhababu, and R. Jay Wallace.

From the reviews on the dustjacket:

"Nietzsche has a tendency to throw out themes and leave us the task of seeing how they cohere. Many of the essays in this book try to tie up apparent loose ends, and make him say what he should have said if he had followed his insights through. We are entering a new era of Nietzsche studies." Roger Caldwell, Philosophy Now

"This collection of essays contains some of the best recent work on Nietzsche and moral philosophy. The editors state that their aim is to present work that advances the understanding of Nietzsche's ethical views and demonstrates the relevance of those views to contemporary debates in normative ethics, metaethics, and moral psychology. In relation to these two ends, the collection is clearly a success. It presents very good historical scholarship as well as some first-rate work in moral philosophy that engages with the issues that concerned Nietzsche. The collection will certainly be of interest to moral philosophers and to those interested in the history of modern philosophy, and many of the essays should be regarded as essential reading for anyone interested in Nietzsche's engagement with morality."--Scott Jenkins, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

"This volume constitutes a significant advance in the Nietzsche literature. It is among a handful of volumes that anyone with a serious interest in Nietzsche simply must read. It will also be rewarding for anyone who is interested in the way in which moral psychology and action theory bear on ethics." Paul Katsafanas, Mind

Another Friend of the Naturalist Reading of Nietzsche

Here (in French--a grad student at the Jean Nicod Institute).

The Last "Most Important" Philosopher Poll

Our man is trailing--brace yourself--Augustine! Help him out. More substantive postings coming as the term is coming to an end here.

Another Poll: Vote for Nietzsche!

Here. So far, Hegel is ahead of Nietzsche. Unbelievable!

More Polling Amusement: Rank Order Your Favorite Books About Nietzsche

Here. Obviously the list omits books that some might have included; I've tried to give a decent sampling of English, German, and French literature, though I've no doubt over-represented recent Anglophone literature just because it tends to be better and I follow it more carefully. Worthy candidates not included should be noted in the comment section, but the comment must be signed or it will not appear.

A Useful Review of a New Collection of Essays on Zarathustra

Here, by a former student of mine, Neil Sinhababu. This was skillfully done, given that it obviously was a fairly uneven collection. But the review is informative and generous in finding merit or matters of interest in most of the pieces, and identifying those that are particularly worth reading.

Where Have Readers Had Good Experiences with Language Study?

A question that always comes up for PhD students is where to go for summer programs to develop or improve their German reading, translation, and sometimes speaking skills. Years ago, I found the scholarly reading and translation classes at NYU's Deutsches Haus to be quite valuable, but this was nearly 20 years ago, and I've no idea whether they continue to offer suitable summer classes and whether they remain good. (I did have to pay for them, and obviously information about financial aid for such programs would also be welcome.) In any case, it seemed to me that it might be useful to collect in one place recommendations of good programs in the US or in Germany based on reader experiences.

More Thoughts on the Argument from "Moral Disagreement," Part II

This is a belated follow-up to the earlier post addressing an excellent set of questions and challenges raised by Justin Clarke-Doane (NYU) (hereafter JCD) to my claim that Nietzsche argues for moral skepticism by appeal to the phenomenon of moral disagreement. JCD's first set of objections (discussed earlier, with replies by JCD in the comments) raised worries about the extent to which disagreement in ethics was different from disagreement in mathematics--which might warrant anti-realism about the latter or be thought a reductio of the former strategy of argument (assuming that realism about mathematics seems irresistible). In his second set of comments, JCD raises some more general reductio style challenges to the strategy of argument from disagreement. He raises, it seems to me, two very interesting issues:

1. First, JCD points out that philosophers have had significant disagreements about a range of issues, from common-sense claims about the reality of midsize physical objects, to claims about the structure of spacetime, to meta-philosophical claims about philosophy itself. Should we infer skepticism about the subjects in question from these facts about disagreement? Of course, the argument I am concerned with holds that the best explanation of persistent and intractable disagreement is skepticism that there is any fact of the matter about the subject of disagreement. JCD's examples warrant different treatments depending on the facts of each case.

For example, there was not persistent and intractable disagreement about the non-Euclidean character of spacetime: Kant thought it obviously false, and now everyone realizes that Kant was wrong. Disagreement about (as JCD calls them) "first-order intuitively metaphysical claims" (e.g., the existence of properties or possible worlds) probably does warrant the skeptical inference, so there I am happy to "bite the bullett" (and to do so in Nietzschean terms, e.g., I assume philosophers' metaphysical sympathies track underlying moral commitments, which are themselves explicable psychologically). Disagreement about "intuitively common-sense claims" (e.g., about the existence of table and chairs) does not strike me as either persistent or intractable: skepticism about tables and chairs is now a decidely minority viewpoint (I think I can count the philosophical skeptics on one hand!), and the minority's existence seems more easily explicable sociologically (e.g., there are professional rewards for staking out crackpot positions) than by genuine epistemic uncertainties.

Now JCD acknowledges that there are differing degrees of disagreements about his examples (I have not mentioned all of them, just what I hope is a representative sample). But he makes two points that deserve response. First, JCD notes that "the mere possibility that philosophers have held conflicting views with respect to a given claim in the absence of a cognitive shortcoming seems to me to be just as worrisome as the actuality of this." But this can't be right, since it is central to the argument for moral skepticism that disgareements be persistent and intractable, characteristics that are highly probative of as to what explains the disagreement (e.g., a cognitive shortcoming or the absence of any fact of the matter). Second, JCD notes, fairly enough, that "there has been less disagreement among philosophers with respect to some moral claims" than some of the issues noted above (e.g., the metaphysical and common-sense claims); he gives, though, as an example of a moral claim which has generated less disagreement the following: "the claim that one ought not cause needless harm." This, it seems to me, just obscures the fact that the disagreement here concerns the notion of which harms are "needless," a disagreement which is surely a moral one.

JCD raises a second general issue: namely, whether disagreement among philosophers is really relevant to an explanatory argument for skepticism. As he notes, one might think the "virtual unamity among *physicists* with respect to the claim that spacetime is non-Euclidean" is far more important than disagreement among philosophers about the same subject-matter. Of course, it was precisely developments in physics that put an end to the disagreement among philosophers. But putting that to one side, one might worry that philosophical disagreements about subject-matter X are particularly amenable to non-realist explanations, even when X itself is the object of considerable agreement among non-philosophers. (In any case, that is how I understand JCD's interesting challenge.) As JCD notes, even I concede that philosophical disagreements about morality "often fail to translate into disagreements over what is right or wrong in concrete cases" which might suggest that the philosophical disagreement is "at far remove from the day to day moral discussion." If the "folk" (or the scientific folk) can agree about X, why think philosophical disagreement counts against realism about X? That, I take it, is JCD's worry.

So framed, I think JCD's point is correct: it is part of the reason I do not think skepticism about the non-Euclidean structure of spacetime is warranted. Kant's intuitions about spacetime yielded before work in mathematical physics, as it should. (Mathematical physics has more cognitive content than philosophy, one might suppose.) But does the same general point tell against moral skepticism? Here, I think, the matter is more complex. First, it is not like the 'folk' have the kind of convergence in moral opinion that the physicists have in opinion about the non-Euclidean structure of spacetime. Second, the existence of diagreement among the 'folk' about moral matters is precisely what pushes the issues back one level, to the philosophical realm: the philosophical disagreement tracks, at a more abstract level to be sure, the folk disagreement. And yet the philosophers, despite all their 'advantages' (of time, education, insulation from external pressure etc. etc.), still fail to resolve the foundational issues. To be sure, if there were a "moral physics" converging around certain propositions, then the skeptical argument would face a problem: but the only candidate for the "moral physics" is the work of the moral philosophers, and that is precisely the data on which the skeptical argument from disagreement relies!

Some Old Reviews: of Safranski, Kohler, Conway, among others

I was surprised to discover that the Times Literary Supplement makes available on-line old book reviews, including several of mine. Readers might be amused by the scathing assessment of a comically bad book by Daniel Conway, that seems, not surprisingly, to have had no impact on the subsequent scholarly discussion. This review of three 'biographical' books may be useful for those looking for biographical treatments of Nietzsche: Safranski's is worth reading, Kohler's is a disgrace. They also have on-line an old essay I did for TLS on Nietzsche's naturalism; some of this material was later incorporated into Nietzsche on Morality.

In any case, readers may be pleased to learn of this searchable archive. It has already allowed me to catch up on some reviews I missed since my TLS subscription lapsed several years ago.

Which Anglophone school would you recommend for PhD studies focusing on Nietzsche?

I'm curious to see what readers think about this one.

CORRECTION: The CUNY listing should also include N. Pappas, who works on Plato and on Nietzsche.

UPDATE: So with a mere 22 votes cast, here are the "top seven," which are pretty tightly clustered. No surprises here, I think, though perhaps with more votes things will spread out a bit.

1. University of Chicago (J. Conant, M. Forster, R. Gooding-Williams, B. Leiter, M. Nussbaum, R. Pippin) (Condorcet winner: wins contests with all other choices)

2. University of California, Riverside (M. Clark, P. Keller, M. Wrathall) loses to University of Chicago (J. Conant, M. Forster, R. Gooding-Williams, B. Leiter, M. Nussbaum, R. Pippin) by 11–6

3. University of Southampton (K. Gemes, C. Janaway, D. Owen, A. Ridley) loses to University of Chicago (J. Conant, M. Forster, R. Gooding-Williams, B. Leiter, M. Nussbaum, R. Pippin) by 12–3, loses to University of California, Riverside (M. Clark, P. Keller, M. Wrathall) by 9–8

4. University of Warwick (K. Ansell-Pearson, S. Houlgate, P. Poellner) loses to University of Chicago (J. Conant, M. Forster, R. Gooding-Williams, B. Leiter, M. Nussbaum, R. Pippin) by 10–6, loses to University of Southampton (K. Gemes, C. Janaway, D. Owen, A. Ridley) by 8–6

5. Stanford University (L. Anderson, N. Hussain) loses to University of Chicago (J. Conant, M. Forster, R. Gooding-Williams, B. Leiter, M. Nussbaum, R. Pippin) by 15–3, loses to University of Warwick (K. Ansell-Pearson, S. Houlgate, P. Poellner) by 8–7

6. Brown University (C. Larmore, B. Reginster) loses to University of Chicago (J. Conant, M. Forster, R. Gooding-Williams, B. Leiter, M. Nussbaum, R. Pippin) by 15–1, loses to Stanford University (L. Anderson, N. Hussain) by 7–5

7. New York University (M. Evans, B. Longuenesse, J. Richardson) loses to University of Chicago (J. Conant, M. Forster, R. Gooding-Williams, B. Leiter, M. Nussbaum, R. Pippin) by 14–3, loses to Brown University (C. Larmore, B. Reginster) by 7–5

Best Journals for Nietzsche Scholarship?

Here is a new poll, which may be especially helpful to younger scholars trying to figure out where to submit their Nietzsche work:

Which journals, in your experience, publish the best quality philosophical scholarship on Nietzsche? (I list only journals that publish articles on Nietzsche with some regularity, so exclude those journals which, on occasion, publish something related to Nietzsche [e.g., Ethics, Philosophical Review, Philosophers' Imprint etc.].)

The poll is here. My own view is that European Journal of Philosophy is generally best, though even EJP publishes work below the standard of the best Nietzsche work that makes it into other mainstream journals like the ones that are not part of this poll. But I will be interested to see whether readers agree.

What are your favorite books by Nietzsche?

By reader demand, here's a new poll with which to have some fun. This one I'm quite curious to see the results.

Condorcet, Nietzsche, and Great Philosophers

The final round of this game.

Now Your Votes Are Needed More than Ever...

...as our man goes for the big prize! Seriously, I fear my many good friends in the Anglophone philosophical community are going to embarrass themselves by voting in ridiculously large numbers for Lewis and Rawls. Help save them the embarrassment!

Who was the greatest philosopher of the 19th-Century?

Feel free to vote, even if you're not going to vote for the correct choice!

A Note about the Blog

Despite best efforts, and helpful suggestions from readers, I've not been able to find a way to get recent comments to show up in the sidebar. My apologies. I appreciate the input from readers. One reason I'm going to continue this blog is because the feedback from readers has been genuinely informative and interesting. Thanks.

Nietzsche and Lamarck

So one nice thing about living in Chicago is that I'm now just a train (or taxi) ride away from the Central Division meetings of the American Philosophical Association. I was thus able to attend an unusually substantive session of the North American Nietzsche Society with presentations by Richard Schacht (emeritus, Illinois) and Maudemarie Clark (UC Riverside). Schacht argued forcefully that we need to acknowledge the influence of Lamarck's view that acquired characteristics are heritable on many aspects of Nietzsche's thought, while Clark presented a careful challenge to Schacht's reading of particular bits of textual evidence for his thesis. I expect (though this isn't certain) that the papers will appear in a forthcoming issue of International Studies in Philosophy.

My own view, which I offered in discussion, is something of a middle ground between Schacht and Clark (though perhaps closer to Schacht's view of the matter). Schacht is right to emphasize that it really would be astonishing if Nietzsche--self-educated, as he was, in matters scientific--dissented from the familiar Lamarckian orthodoxy of the era. So we should expect to find some passages in his corpus that just presuppose, as uncontroversial, Lamarckian assumptions.

On the other hand, it did seem to me that Schacht swept far too many passages, including large parts of the Genealogy, into the Lamarckian framework, without adequate evidence. As Clark pointed out, many passages Schacht invoked seemed equally compatible with the idea of cultural (rather than biological) transmission of acquired characteristics. Some of the passages (BGE 264 most strikingly) were ambiguous as between the claim that personality traits are heritable (which we know now to be true: cf. discussion in Knobe & Leiter [2007]) and the distinctively Lamarckian claim that acquired characteristics can be inherited. (There is, to be sure, no reason to think Nietzsche was sensitive to this distinction [between heritability and inheritance], but here at least there's a way to interpret what Nietzsche says in a way that does not make it dependent on a manifestly false view, i.e., the Lamarckian one.) Finally, many of the phenomenona in question--such as the acquisition of bad conscience--seem clearly explicable on the assumption not that acquired characteristics were inherited, but rather that certain kinds of recurrent social stimuli reproduce the same kind of effect across generations. So, e.g., if bad conscience represents the internalization of cruelty in response to the constraints that civilization place on human beings, then we should expect bad consicence to be a recurrent attribute of creatures like us brought up within those contraints. The only 'biological' assumption here is that humans all have some degree of instrinctive cruelty; but insofar as other aspects of their biology drive them towards civilized forms of social intercourse with their fellows, we should expect 'bad conscience' to arise across generations.

"Nietzsche on Mind and Nature" at Oxford in September 2009--Update

The deadline for abstracts for papers is now March 15. This promises to be one of the most philosophically substantial FNS events.

Katsafanas Reviews Leiter & Sinhababu (eds.), "Nietzsche and Morality"...

in Mind. Lots of interesting, substantive discussion, including of Hussain's fictionalist reading of Nietzsche, which we have discussed before.

More Thoughts on the Argument from "Moral Disagreement," Part I

These are some thoughts in response to the excellent set of comments by Justin Clarke-Doane (a PhD student at NYU doing fascinating work on disagreement in mathematics--he has a pertinent paper on his homepage for those interested) in the thread on my paper on "Moral Skepticism and Moral Disagreement in Nietzsche." Clarke-Doane raised so many interesting issues that they deserve their own posts, on which I hope he and others can then comment. (I'll refer to him hereafter as JCD.)

In my paper, I had argued from the fact of "persistent and apparently intractable disaggrement on foundational questions" in moral theory to the conclusion that we ought to be skeptical about the existence of moral facts or properties. JCD claims that we find the same kind of disagreement in mathematics. This might, of course, lead us to skepticism about mathematical facts or it might lead us to worry about this strategy of argument. JCD doesn't take a position on that issue here. He wants, in his first set of comments, to make the case that the situation, when it comes to disagreement, is the same in math as I claim it is in ethics. (His second set of comments raise a different set of issues, to which I'll turn in a second post.)

As an example of "persistent" disagreement in mathematics, JCD notes that, "There has been disagreement over the axioms for set-theory since their formulation."

As evidence that this disagreement is "apparently intractable," JCD notes that "there is not merely disaggrement over the truth-values of mathematical sentences, but also disagreement over what would count as evidence for those sentences' truth or falsity." JCD gives the examples of disagreement over the Choice and Replacement axioms.

As evidence that this disagreement has a "foundational character," JCD notes that disagreement over the axioms for set-theory is "epistemically foundational" for mathematics, since these are "the only serious candidates which might be thought to justify axioms which imply them." Such disagreement is also "metaphysically foundational" since "the axioms of our 'explanatorily' fundamental theory, set theory" are the metaphysical foundation of mathematics.

JCD has the significant advantage here of knowing a lot more mathematics than I do, though I hope to hear from readers also conversant in the underlying mathematical debates. I don't want to take issue with the question of whether the putative disagreements in questions are "foundational" (other readers are welcome to do so); I do want to pose some questions about whether they are "persistent" and "apparently intractable."

Set theory dates from the late 19th-century, so has been subject to about 140 years of development and dispute by mathematicians. How does the state of disagreement today compare to 100 years ago? To 50 years ago? To 25 years ago? Reading the SEP entry on set theory , one is left with the impression of a progressive discipline with gradual agreement on many basic ideas. Why is this? Could any entry on the foundations of morality read like the SEP entry on set theory?

The latter, purely sociological, observations bear on the question of intractability. It appears that many foundational issues in set theory have been resolved since the 1870s. (Is there any foundational issue about the criteria of right action that has been resolved since the 1870s? Or since the 1670s?) Evidence of 'intractability' has partly to do with persistence, but partly to do with the terms in which disagreement is carried out. Foundational debates in ethics devolve into clashing intuitions and accusations of moral corruption and obtuseness rather quickly! What are the terms on which apparently 'intractable' debates about set theory are carried out?

JCD makes the interesting sociological point that "the correlation between relevant mathematicians' views and thsoe of their mentor is impossible to miss." How long does that pattern last? Over multiple generations? Or do we find that the student of X often comes to reject the views of his teacher's teacher?

I don't presuppose answers to these questions. But their answers might well suggest which horn of JCD's dilemma we should embrace (i.e., mathematical skepticism or skepticiam about the argument from disagreement).

I should note that I don't quite understand JCD's reference, near the end of his first set of remarks, to the fact that fictionalists in philosophy of mathematics deny simple arithmetical truths. The argument from moral disagreement appeals to first-order disagreement in ethical theory about the criteria of right action, the nature of moral goodnes, and the relative priority of rightnes and goodness in the evaluatoin of actions and persons, among other considerations. It does not depend on claims about the metaphysics, epistemology, or semantics of these judgments. JCD is obviously skeptical about drawing the line between the meta- and first-order disagreements in mathematics. I would like some further explanation of why, and whether there is any reason for that skepticism to carry over to the meta-ethical case.

My Review of Shaw on "Nietzsche's Political Skepticism"

It is now on-line here.

"Nietzsche and Morality" (OUP, 2007) to be Released in Paperback Later This Year

If any readers have spotted typos or similar errors in the cloth version, I'd be grateful if you would let me know, so that we can ask OUP to correct them for the paperback version. Thanks.

Penultimate (essentially final) version of "Nietzsche's Naturalism Reconsidered" Now On-Line

Here. I am grateful to those who commented on it last year at this blog. This will appear in The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche (edited by Ken Gemes and John Richardson), due out later this year. There may be a few stylistic or citation tweaks, but this version is final as to substance, and is available for citation and quotation.

Additional comments are, of course, welcome, since these are topics and issues I'm still working on.

"Nietzsche on Mind and Nature" at Oxford in September 2009

Reminder: the deadline for paper proposals is February 1!

New Look for the Blog

Let me know if you prefer this new look to the old one--some readers complained, fairly I think, that the old format was hard to read, and that the links were hard to find. Thanks. Happy New Year to all readers!

Nietzsche's Relationship to Political Philosophy

I've posted my review essay of Tamsin Shaw's book Nietzsche's Political Skepticism (Princeton, 2007), which will appear in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews in January. Most of the review is given over to a detailed critique of Professor Shaw's argument. Those who have read my work for awhile know that I don't waste time doing detailed critiques of insignificant work, so even though I am skeptical about Shaw's main theses, I think they are very much worth engaging.

Here are the introductory and concluding paragraphs of my review essay:

Nietzsche's Political Skepticism (hereafter NPS) is a serious, learned, and novel contribution to the literature on Nietzsche’s relevance to political theory. Against the two dominant strands in the secondary literature—one attributing to Nietzsche a kind of flat-footed commitment to aristocratic forms of social ordering, the other denying that Nietzsche has any political philosophy at all—Shaw stakes out a new and surprising position: namely, that Nietzsche was very much concerned with the familiar question of the moral or normative legitimacy of state power, but was skeptical that with the demise of religion, it would be possible to achieve a practically effective normative consensus about such legitimacy that was untainted by the exercise of state power itself. Although, as I will argue below, there are reasons to be quite skeptical that Nietzsche was interested in anything like these questions, Shaw has laid down a clear and invigorating challenge to existing scholarship on Nietzsche’s politics, and it is one worth meeting.

=====================

NPS is meticulously footnoted, and Shaw displays a wide and generally deep knowledge of all the pertinent secondary literature. I believe this is the first time I have read a work that cites to book reviews I have written, though in each case the citation was substantive: there was a point made in the review that really was relevant to the issues at hand. Professor Shaw is also quite generous in her treatment of other commentators, even when they are, like Leo Strauss, fairly irresponsible. Her discussions of Burckhardt, Lange, Rankean nationalists, and other contemporaneous intellectual developments were learned, lucid, and helpful. The book is almost always quite well-informed about philosophical issues that affect her reading, and Shaw is particularly good, I thought, in her critique of Nadeem Hussain’s important “fictionalist” reading of Nietzsche (see esp. 92-94). Most books by political theorists on Nietzsche are unreadable for philosophers; this book is the exception that proves the rule. I would not hesitate to say that it is the best book on Nietzsche’s political theory I have ever read, even though I find it unpersuasive. Philosophers interested in Nietzsche’s political thought will have to read this book, and it certainly deserves critical attention and response.

New Preface to the Forthcoming Greek Edition of My "Nietzsche on Morality" Book

Some readers might find this of interest. The publisher was keen for me to talk about how I became interested in Nietzsche, and also to address what he described as the still widespread perception in Greece of Nietzsche as a figure of "the right."

Sorry for the Delay in Comments Appearing

I neglected to change my e-mail address from Texas to Chicago, and the Texas address had stopped forwarding, so there was a backlog. I've just now approved a whole bunch of comments, as well as changing my e-mail address to the current one for comment moderation. Thanks to all those who contributed, and my apologies for the mix up.

"Moral Skepticism and Moral Disagreement in Nietzsche"

I've posted a revised version of the paper I gave at the annual NYU "History of Modern Philosophy" conference in November (which generated an excellent and very helpful discussion). I hope the paper may interest moral philosophers generally, as well as Nietzsche scholars. Here is the abstract for the paper:

This essay offers a new interpretation of Nietzsche's argument for moral
skepticism (i.e., the metaphysical thesis that there do not exist any objective
moral properties or facts), an argument that should be of independent
philosophical interest as well. On this account, Nietzsche offers a version of
the argument from moral disagreement, but, unlike familiar varieties, it does
not purport to exploit anthropological reports about the moral views of exotic
cultures, or even garden-variety conflicting moral intuitions about concrete
cases. Nietzsche, instead, calls attention to the single most important and
embarrassing fact about the history of moral theorizing by philosophers over two
millennia: namely, that no rational consensus has been secured on any
substantive, foundational proposition about morality. Persistent and apparently
intractable disagreement on foundational questions, of course, distinguishes
moral theory from inquiry in the sciences and mathematics (perhaps in kind,
certainly in degree). According to Nietzsche, the best explanation for this
disagreement is that, even though moral skepticism is true, philosophers can
still construct valid dialectical justifications for moral propositions because
the premises of different justifications will answer to the psychological needs
of at least some philosophers and thus be deemed true by some of them. The essay
concludes by considering various attempts to defuse this abductive argument for
skepticism based on moral disagreement and by addressing the question whether
the argument "proves too much," that is, whether it might entail an implausible
skepticism about a wide range of topics about which there is philosophical
disagreement.

Blogging about Nietzsche's Theory of Value

Michael Drake is a lawyer with a philosophy background who has been blogging quite a bit about aspects of Nietzsche's theory of value, touching on many issues and authors noted here in the past. There are also opportunities to comment on his postings at his site.

Call for Papers for Nietzsche Society Conference on "Nietzsche on Mind and Nature" at Oxford, September 2009

Nietzsche on Mind and Nature
11 – 13 September 2009
St Peter’s College, University of Oxford

The Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford will host the 2009 International
Conference of Friedrich Nietzsche Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 11-13
September 2009, at St. Peter’s College, Oxford.

Keynote speakers include:

Prof. Günter Abel, Faculty of Philosophy, TU Berlin, Germany.
Prof. Brian Leiter, Faculty of Law, University of Chicago, USA.
Prof. Graham Parkes, Faculty of Philosophy, Cork, Ireland.
Dr. Peter Poellner, Faculty of Philosophy, Warwick University, UK.
Prof. Bernard Reginster, Faculty of Philosophy, Brown University, USA.
Prof. John Richardson, Faculty of Philosophy, NYU, USA.
Prof. Galen Strawson, Department of Philosophy, Reading University, UK.

This conference seeks for the first time to consider Nietzsche’s philosophy of mind in
relation to his philosophical naturalism. We hope to consider papers by Nietzsche
experts with a background in analytical or continental philosophy as well as from those
working in the fields of philosophy of mind and naturalism with a strong interest in
Nietzsche. Potential topics include:

Nietzsche’s theory of subjectivity
Nietzsche and the body
Intentionality
Memory and self
Consciousness and self-consciousness
Nietzsche and biology
Epiphenomenalism
Nietzsche and psychology
Mind-body problem
Awareness, emotion, cognition
Unconsciousness
Perspectivism and the self
Self and otherness
Self-awareness and self-knowledge
Mind as emergent phenomenon
Nietzsche and neuroscience
Nietzsche’s naturalism
Agency and freedom
Mind, world, brain
Intersubjectivity and value

We invite submissions for 30-minute papers on the above or related topics. Please send
an abstract of a maximum of 400 words and a short CV (no longer than one page) via
email by 1 February 2009 to fnsox /at/ philosophy.ox.ac.uk. Notification of acceptance
will be sent no later than 1 March 2009.

For further details, please visit the conference website at
http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/events/nietzsche_mind_conference
or contact the organizers at
fnsox/at/philosophy.ox.ac.uk

Organization:
Dr. Manuel Dries and Dr. Peter Kail, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford.

Gott ist tot!

But not at this small college in Texas. Pretty pathetic.

UPDATE: Temple College, to its credit, reversed itself.