Special issue of "Inquiry" on "Nietzsche's Moral Psychology"

A call for papers.

Nietzsche and Naturalism...in Portugese!

Here.

Nietzsche, Stirner, Dostoyevsky

Charles Pigden, a philosopher at the University of Otago, writes with questions, which I invite readers to address:

What is the scholarly state of play with respect to Stirner's influence on
Nietzsche? There are obvious though perhaps superficial affinities which suggest such an influence and it seems odd to suppose that a voracious reader like Nietzsche would not have known about Stirner and would have passed him by if he had known about him. But as an argument this strikes me as a touch too much like those speculative biographies which enlarge at length on what Shakespeare 'must' have felt or thought. I understand from Safranski's biography that Nietzsche never mentions Mad Max in his extant works or correspondence but that there is evidence from the
memoirs' of Ida Overbeck that Nietzsche not only read Stirner but admired him. Safranski takes the case for influence to be proven, and embarks on a summary of Stirner views in order to clarify what he takes that influence to have been. But is he perhaps being premature? Could Frau Overbeck have been confabulating to back up a thesis she believed for other reasons? Has anything been discovered since Safranski's book which sheds any light on the issue? And what do you think? I note that the issue is left to one side in Nietzsche on Morality and that nobody so much as
mentions Stirner in your OUP anthology (which surprised me a little).

A related question: Do we know which of Dostoevsky's books Nietzsche read apart from Notes from the Underground (which is mentioned in a letter in Kaufman's The Portable Nietzsche)? The question is relevant since I am inclined to think that Dostoevsky's character Stavrogin, the hero of The Devils/Demons/the Possessed is meant to be a sort of immanent critique of Stirner's ideals. Was The Devils translated into a language that Nietzsche understood during his sane and productive lifetime?

"Nietzsche and Community" conference at Wake Forest

It's coming up in April, and I'll be there. Also papers by Maude Clark, John Richardson, Ken Gemes, Julian Young (he's the organizer), Hans Sluga, Ivan Soll, Jessica Berry, and others.

UPDATE: A reader points out that the calendar has the dates wrong--the dates of the conference are Sunday, April 15 through Tuesday, April 17.

Video of my 2010 lecture at the Oxford FNS Meeting: "Who is the 'Sovereign Individual'? Nietzsche on Freedom"

Here. No idea who put it on-line, but there it is.

UPDATE (JANUARY 11): Manuel Dries tells me videos of all the talks from the Oxford conference, including mine, are available via I-Tunes here.

"Five Books": Nietzsche edition

I'm on "The Browser" website recommending "five books," per their usual format. They wanted some primary, some secondary...and, of course, you can't recommend anything you've written yourself.

Rutherford on Nietzsche on Freedom

I was pleased to see that Donald Rutherford's important paper on Spinoza, the Stoics, Nietzsche and the idea of freedom has now appeared in Inquiry.

Two Useful Reviews

Himmelmann on Berry, Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition


Reginster on Gemes & May (eds.), Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy.

ADDENDUM: We discussed Gardner's paper from the Gemes & May volume previously. Contra my analysis of the experience of willing, Reginster writes:

One problem with this proposal is that it conflates willing with successful
willing. But it seems as though I can have an experience of willing even when my
body fails to respond, and I precisely do not feel "as if the bodily qualia are
obeying the thought." When I will to move my paralyzed body, for example, I have
an experience of willing, which means that I identify with a "commandeering
thought" even though it does not elicit obedience. But then this identification
cannot be motivated by the "feeling of power" that is supposed to explain its
occurrence....

This depends on whether it is a correct account of what it feels like to will the movement of a paralyzed part of the body: I would have thought this feels like an attemp at willing, not willing. I actually address this in note 6 of the paper; it is a difficult case that turns on having more information about the phenomenology of paralysis.

Virtual Reading Group on Nietzsche

Carlos, a student at UC Berkeley, is devoting a new website to the discussion of Nietzsche's texts.

The website will be conducted as a virtual reading group, where they will work through each of Nietzsche's books at a rate of approximately one aphorism per day (or four shorter maxims a day).

Carlos has begun with the text of Twilight of the Idols and invites other interested readers to comment on the reading by visiting the comment box at the bottom of each aphorism's page (which can be visited by clicking "read more" or by clicking on the title of the relevant aphorism).

The website for the reading group is: http://verhexung.com

Dirk Johnson on Nietzsche's Anti-Darwinism

I haven't read this book, but I was just reading Ansell-Pearson's review, in which he writes:

The fundamental claim of this book is that we will not properly understand
Nietzsche until we understand the main polemical target of his philosophizing.
This target, the author wants to demonstrate, is the evolutionary naturalism of
Darwin: “Nietzsche’s philosophy in his final years was premised on a fundamental
anti-Darwinism” (p. 203)....According to Paul S. Loeb, who provides the puff on
the back cover, the balanced and careful examination the book offers of this
crucial test case, “results in a powerful critique of the prevalent naturalistic
approach to Nietzsche.” In short, instead of trying to co-opt Nietzsche for
fashionable projects we need to respect the independence of his philosophical
thinking.

This is puzzling. Who, apart from Richardson in the 2004 book, reads Nietzsche as a systematically Darwinian naturalist? There are obvious Darwinian themes here and there in Nietzsche (as in his critique of Paul Ree, or his Lamarckianism), but I'm not aware of anyone other than Richardson reading Nietzsche as fundamentally a Darwinian naturalist. Ansell-Pearson suggests that this ambiguity infects the book: "There is, however, an ambiguity at the heart of Johnson’s book that is never satisfactorily resolved: is the suggestion that Nietzsche is not at all a naturalist, or is it that he needs to be liberated from his entanglement with a fashionable Darwinism?"

Thoughts from readers who have read the book? Is it confused as Ansell-Pearson implies? And is it worth reading? Signed comments, as usual, will be strongly preferred.

Huenemann on Berry on Nietzsche

Here.

"Nietzsche's Nietzsche"...

...from a fashion designer? Odd.

(Thanks to Rob Sica for the pointer.)

"Nietzsche and Moral Psychology" Syllabus

Here's the 95% complete syllabus (which incorporates a couple of good suggestions from longtime reader Rob Sica).

On-Line Nietzsche Articles from EJP

European Journal of Philosophy has made available on-line articles they have published on Nietzsche over the last (not quite) 20 years. I especially recommend the debate between Hussain and Clark & Dudrick; also the papers by Anderson, Katsafanas (which we have discussed previously), Geuss's "Nietzsche and Genealogy" essay (which is in our OUP Reading volume on Nietzsche), the old Williams essay (which is slight, but useful), and the important paper by Risse on the 2nd Essay of GM, which has generated a lot of discussion.

Draft Syllabus for "Nietzsche and Moral Pychology"

The draft syllabus for the seminar Michael Forster and I are offering in Spring is on-line here. Our first session is Tuesday, March 29, and we will be discussing the first three chapters of the Prinz book; Jesse will visit the seminar the following week (and we'll also do Chapter 4 of his book), and after that we will begin with the Nietzsche readings proper. Please also read my paper "Nietzsche's Naturalism Reconsidered" by April 12.

Nietzsche and Empirical Psychology

I'll have an essay on the topic in the March 4, 2011 Times Literary Supplement. If they put it on-line, I'll post a link.

Sales of academic books

I just got my latest OUP royalties statement, and thought readers might find this interesting (or instructive or maybe depressing). The co-edited Nietzsche and Morality book (2007) that I did with Neil Sinhababu has sold over 1200 copies, since publication (805 hardcover, 450 paper, and 1 e-book). The old OUP Readings volume on Nietzsche I did with John Richardsonn back in 2001 has lifetime sales of nearly 2,400 (all paperback, no hardcover edition). The more recent Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy (edited with Michael Rosen, 2007) has sold an amazing 560 copies in hardcover (amazing given the price) and nearly 500 copies in paperback. What bears emphasizing is that these are good sales figures in academia. Nietzsche sells!

(My Routledge Nietzsche on Morality has sold around 5,000 copies since 2002, though I haven't seen recent sales data on it. So that's a regular "best-seller"!)

Brian Leiter dot net

Many of you have probably seen my new personal homepage via my philosophy blog, but just in case not here it is. The 'video and audio' section includes links to some podcasts and radio programs I've done about Nietzsche that might be of interest to some readers.

Me and Peter Poellner at the Nietzsche Society Meeting in Oxford in 2009

Here, courtesy of Babette Babich. Not sure why I look so unhappy, I always enjoy talking to Peter. He must have been saying something really serious!

Nietzsche's Obituary in the New York Times, August 26, 1900

Could they have gotten more things wrong in so little space?