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.