Paul Katsafanas' misrepresentations in a recent review essay discussing my "Moral Psychology with Nietzsche"

Having written a quite critical review of Paul Kastafanas's book on The Nietzschean Self (2016), and knowing that Paul and I have significant differences about how to read Nietzsche, I wasn't expecting him to like my Moral Psychology with Nietzsche (hereafter Leiter 2019). However, I was surprised by his superficial engagement with the arguments, and the wholly inaccurate and irresponsible allegations about my misrepresenting texts. To put this in some context: Paul is a smart philosopher, and has done some very good work on Nietzsche, but The Nietzschean Self in particular played fast and loose with Nietzsche's texts, a point I called attention to in my review. This isn't controversial; Paul has earned something of a reputation for not being a reliable guide to the texts.

I suppose Paul's recent discussion of my book in a review essay in Nietzsche-Studien is an attempt to try to turn the tables in that regard. (I give page references to the published version in volume 50 of N-S, 2021, pages 361-381.) Ironically (but perhaps predictably), almost all of his claims that I "misrepresented" an argument or text actually involve Paul misrepresenting them. Paul, in short, is still playing "fast and loose" not just with Nietzsche's texts, but that of other scholars. 

The real trouble starts at p. 371 of his essay, where he claims that "many of the [foot]notes on recent literature [in Leiter's book] are either disappointingly imprecise or factually inaccurate." 

The first example PK gives is my criticism that his argument "trade[s] extensively on conflating" the claim that Nietzsche employs power as an evaluate standard with the claim that he thinks it is the uniquely justified evaluative standard. PK points out that he acknowledged these two possibilities in his first book, Agency and the Foundations of Ethics, at pp. 153-156.  He did indeed, and I didn't deny that: the problem is that, despite acknowledging the difference, PK proceeds to conflate the evidence that Nietzsche thinks we should use power as an evaluate standard with the claim that he thinks doing so enjoys some special justification.  Indeed, PK's review essay actually offers an example:  a couple of pages earlier when (at page 369) he is objecting to my view that Nietzsche is an anti-realist about value, PK asserts that "Nietzsche just straightforwardly asserts that power, health, and/or life are the criteria of evaluation that we should employ" (369). But this is exactly the conflation at issue! The evidence shows only that Nietzsche employs, e.g., "power" as a criterion of evaluation, not that he thinks we "should" because it is objectively justified.

To support the misleading claim that this is the "literal" reading of what Nietzsche says, PK writes,

[I]f John Stuart Mill says that you should asses actions in terms of utility, most people would read Mill as stating just that:  we should assess actions in terms of utility.  Or, if Kant says we should assess actions via the Categorical Imperative, most of us would read Kant as meaning just that:  we should assess actions in terms of the Categorical Imperative.  But Leiter wants to read Nietzsche a different way. (369) 

Unmentioned (remarkably) by PK is that Mill and Kant give actual arguments for why actions should be evaluated in the ways they endorse:  Mill appeals to psychological hedonism and an internalist assumption about what could be good for someone, and Kant appeals to the constraints on a principle for action that a rational agent would recognize.  No reader need appeal to the supposed "literal" reading, since these philosophers explicitly try to justify their criteria of evaluation as the correct ones.  The only comparable argument in Nietzsche requires appealing to texts he did not publish; and even there, the only argument in the offing, as I discuss in detail (2019:   52-62), is a variation on Mill's (swapping out Mill's psychological hedonism for Nietzsche's psychology of the will to power), and it is a bad argument, so kudos to Nietzsche for not publishing it!

PK is presumably aware of my actual point since in a footnote of his review essay [p. 371 n. 15], he writes:  "Perhaps Leiter thinks that although I discuss the distinction at length [BL:  3 pages], I somehow fail to keep track of it [BL: correct!].  If so, we need more than bare assertion:  we would need some indication of where my argument [for conflating the two claims] is supposed to go astray."  Devastating critiques of PK's preferred reading of Nietzsche by Andrew Huddleston and Simon Robertson are, in fact, referenced in my book on precisely these points (Leiter 2019:  50 n. 3; 56 n. 16).  PK's real complaint is that I did not spend more time discussing his views that others had already refuted.  

Thus, PK complains (369) that I failed to "consider[] the careful, analytically precise work on this topic that has emerged int he past decade or so" (that description picks out PK's work!) and faults me for discussing "a fifty-year old paper by Philippa Foot and an offhand, forty-year old remark by Richard Schacht" (369).  Clearly Nietzsche-Studien employs no editors for the commissioned review essays, or else this display of vanity would not have appeared in print.  Foot, one of the major moral philosophers of the second half of the 20th-century, wrote an important and influential paper on Nietzsche; why its age matters is mysterious.  And the passage from Schacht I quote and discuss was not "offhand," it was central to a sustained argument he develops in a chapter of his well-known 1983 book.  The shorter version of PK's complaint would have been:  "Leiter consigned my [implausible] views to footnotes, rather than giving them pride of place in the text."

So PK's first example of a putative misrepresentation is nothing of the kind.  But he then claims that this "misrepresentation [sic] is characteristic" (371).  In one way it is: it reveals how unreliable PK is.

The next example offered by PK is that, "Leiter chastises me for not citing a book by Bernoulli...[when] in fact, there is a citation of Bernoulli's book on the very page that Leiter is complaining about" (371). In fact, there is no citation of Bernoulli on p. 248 of Katsafanas's Agency and the Foundations of Ethics, there is instead a citation to Bernd Magnus (n. 8) speculating that R.J. Hollingdale may have been influenced by Bernoulli's book--in other words, there is no evidence Paul actually looked at Bernoulli's text. This is rather important, since my whole point (Leiter 2019: 60-61) is that Bernoulli's text (not Hollingdale's or Magnus's) gives important details about Nietzsche's disposal of unpublished material that later became The Will to Power.   Once again, I was wholly correct:  PK did not cite Bernoulli's book, he cited someone else speculating that another scholar might have been influence by Bernoulli's book.  

Paul follows this with the next supposed example of a misrepresentation:

And then there is this claim about Sharon Street:  "unlike some recent Anglophone philosophers (e.g., Street 2006:  130-1), Nietzsche recognizes that evolutionary forces affecting human cognition do not necessarily prefer true to false belief--even in the case of ordinary knowledge about the empirical world [Leiter 2019:  87].  As someone familiar with Street's work, this claim struck me as fairly surprising.  So I checked.  And sure enough, in the very article and on the very page that Leiter cites, Streets makes the opposite claim from the one that Leiter attributes to her.  She writes:  "Sure, one might think, an organism who is aware of the truth in a given area, whether evaluative or otherwise, will do better than one who isn't.  But this line of thought falls apart upon closer examination."  (371)

This one really took my breath away for its brazen dishonesty:  the quote from Street, in context (130-131 of her article, as I cited!), is obviously about evaluative truths, and of course her whole thesis is that evolutionary speculation provides no reason for thinking evaluative judgments are truth-tracking.  But she then goes on to say--in the very next sentence on p. 131, which Paul omits--the following:

First consider truths about a creature’s manifest surroundings for example, that there is a fire raging in front of it, or a predator rushing toward it. It is perfectly clear why it tends to promote reproductive success for a creature to grasp such truths: the fire might burn it to a crisp; the predator might eat it up.

In other words, she explicitly endorses the view that "evolutionary forces affecting human cognition do...prefer true to false belief" when it comes to "ordinary knowledge about the empirical world," exactly as I said (and as Stephen Stich argues against in the paper I then cite, and which I take Nietzsche also to deny in the passage from The Gay Science I was discussing).  Precisely because this is Street's view, she has to go on and spend several pages (135-141 of her article) showing how her argument reaches naturalistic moral realists (those who think moral properties are empirical properties), who might claim that evolutionary considerations don't undermine their kind of moral realism.  PK misses all this.

After these three examples, PK actually has the audacity to say that these examples "do not inspire confidence that Leiter is an accurate reader of scholarship with which he believes he disagrees" (371).  Substitute Katsafanas for Leiter, and this sentence would be quite apt.

I should mention one other alleged misrepresentation  PK attributes to me, that precedes the above discussion of the alleged pattern.  This is worth, again, quoting at length to show how consistently unreliable PK is.  On p. 370, he writes:

Leiter considers whether Nietzsche might hold that "power is the only thing that is, in fact, desired" (2019:  56).  Leiter claims "many, of course, have thought that Nietzsche held precisely this view," although he does not cite a single person who actually thinks this.  He does claim, a few pages later, that I believe that will to power is "the exclusive motivation for all human behavior" (59 n. 16).  That is false:  in Agency and the Foundations, I defend the view that power is  ubiquitous human motivation, not that it is the only human motivation.... (370).

The view that I claimed "many...have thought that Nietzsche held" is not the first view quoted by PK:  it is, instead, the view (2019:  56) that "only power is valuable," and I in fact quote several passages in which Nietzsche suggests it (2019:  56 n. 10), and which Schacht, my main target in this chapter, clearly holds.  In the text, I go on to critique "a view that will to power is the exclusive explanation for all human behavior," and in a footnote I point out that PK "bites that bullett" on the implausible implications of this kind of view.  My text continues (unnoted by PK, of course):

Do I manifest the will to power by showing up to teach my classes?  By holding my office hours?  Do I express a desire for power when I shop for groceries?  Buy furniture?  Cook dinner?  Surely the list of ordinary activities and actions that do not seem helpfully explained by reference to a fundamental drive for (or tendency towards) power could go on and on.  (2019:  59)

PK's objection is that he claims will to power was a "ubiquitous" not "exclusive" motivation.  But as my actual objection makes clear, that is a difference that literally makes no difference given the objection at issue.  PK's view that will to power is "ubiquitous" is implausible, as Huddleston and Robertson demonstrated, and as I suggest in the quoted passage, above.

There are other rather feeble responses to arguments in my book in PK's review essay; they don't involve blatant misrepresentations, like the preceding, so much as a failure to engage seriously with competing views.   I will give just one example.  PK complains that, "Leiter spends a fair amount of time arguing against a detail [sic] of my reading of Nietzsche on consciousness," namely, his conflation of conceptual with linguistic articulation (368); of course, PK doesn't acknowledge it as a mistaken conflation, and hardly a "detail," since it is a mistake that vitiates many of his subsequent claims. He then says, falsely, that there is "no direct textual evidence for" thinking Nietzsche employed this distinction (even though the textual evidence is discussed explicitly in my book at 2019:  135-136), and says I only attribute it to Nietzsche to "avoid certain philosophical problems that Nietzsche never mentions" (368). Of course, since Nietzsche did not make PK's mistake, it's hardly surprising he did not mention the problems involved in making it!  As I noted in my review of the book, Katsafanas's mistake vitiates many, but certainly not all, of the arguments in his book. I realize it's hard to admit a mistake that fundamental, but I would expect better of an intelligent scholar. Mattia Riccardi's recent Nietzsche's Philosophical Psychology--which pointedly does not suffer from this conflation of linguistic and conceptual content--demonstrates quite clearly the significance of getting Nietzsche's view of consciousness right. 

Weak arguments like the preceding would not have been worth commenting on at all:  reviews often make feeble arguments, although good reviews offer interesting counter-arguments.  But to accuse another scholar of serial "misrepresentations," when in fact the reviewer is the one serially misrepresenting the texts and arguments is disgraceful.

Where to go for postgraduate Nietzsche studies, 2021

The recommendations are premised on three assumptions about what is needed to do good PhD work on Nietzsche: (1) a strong, general philosophical education; (2) good Nietzsche scholars to supervise the work; and (3) a philosophical environment in which one can get a solid grounding in the history of philosophy, especially ancient philosophy, Kant, and post-Kantian German philosophy. 

With that in mind, here's the eight programs I'd strongly recommend for someone certain they plan to focus on Nietzsche: 

Birkbeck College, University of London: a solid department overall, albeit a bit narrow (top 15ish in the UK), unusual in having two Nietzsche scholars on faculty: at the senior ranks, Ken Gemes [who is only part-time] and at the junior ranks, Timothy Stoll. If one reaches out to faculty at other London colleges, one can also get the necessary historical education in other figures. 

Brown University: a strong department overall (top 20 in the US), with one leading Nietzsche specialist, Bernard Reginster, and two other senior faculty with sympathetic and complementary interests (Paul Guyer and Charles Larmore). Guyer and Larmore, as well as Mary Louise Gill, provide strong coverage of other important periods and figures for purposes of studying Nietzsche.

Columbia University: a very strong department overall (top 10ish in the US), with three senior faculty with interests in Nietzsche (although only one is a specialist, Gooding-Williams): Taylor Carman, Robert Gooding-Williams, and Frederick Neuhouser. With these three, as well as Lydia Goehr and (part-time) Axel Honneth, also one of the best places in the U.S. to study the Continental traditions in philosophy. Also offers strong coverage of ancient philosophy and Kant. 

New York University: the best department in the Anglophone world, with three senior faculty with interests in Nietzsche: Robert Hopkins, John Richardson, and Tamsin Shaw (though only Richardson seems to be actively working on Nietzsche these days). The department now also has strong coverage of ancient philosophy and through Richardson and Anja Jauernig solid coverage of Kant and the post-Kantian Continental traditions. Given the department's dominant strengths in other areas to date (e.g., metaphysics, philosophy of mind), so far there have been hardly any students there working on Nietzsche or other post-Kantian figures--something a prospective student should investigate. 

Oxford University: a very strong faculty (top 2-3 in the Anglophone world), with strong coverage of the history of philosophy, with one significant senior Nietzsche scholar (Peter Kail) and one strong younger Nietzsche specialist (Alexander Prescott-Couch). Stephen Mulhall, Joseph Schear and Mark Wrathall offer good coverage of other aspects of the post-Kantian Continental traditions, especially Heidegger and phenomenology. Also outstanding in ancient philosophy. 

University of California, Riverside: a solid department overall (top 30ish in the US) and one of the best places in the U.S. to study the Continental traditions in philosophy with two important senior faculty--Maudemarie Clark (a leading Nietzsche specialist) and Pierre Keller (Kant, German Idealism, phenomenology)--as well as the recently tenured Sasha Newton (Kant, German Idealism) and Georgia Warnke in Political Science. The department is especially notable for the way in which the study of the Continental traditions is closely integrated with the study of the rest of philosophy, to the enrichment of both. (It's also a very collegial place, one of my favorite departments to visit in the country.) There is also a large and impressive group of graduate students working on the post-Kantian traditions and/or interested in Nietzsche. 

University of Chicago: a strong, if somewhat idiosyncratic, department (top 20ish in the US), with particular strengths in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy and in Kant and post-Kantian German philosophy. Chicago has to have more scholars interested in Nietzsche from more divergent points of view than anywhere else: besides me, also Martha Nussbaum, Robert Pippin, David Wellbery, and (part-time still) James Conant and Michael Forster. As with Riverside, there is a large group of students interested in Nietzsche (six of the eight PhDs I've worked closely with in recent years have had serious Nietzsche interests, two have published on Nietzsche, and one wrote a dissertation with a significant Nietzsche component). (Note: All of Pippin's supervision in German philosophy in recent years has been of students working on Kant or Hegel.) 

University of Warwick: a solid department overall (top 10ish in the UK), with one notable Nietzsche scholar (Andrew Huddleston) and strong coverage generally of Kant and the post-Kantian Continental traditions (e.g., Quassim Cassam, Stephen Houlgate [who also is interested in Nietzsche]). 

Here are some other departments a student interested in Nietzsche should certainly consider as well, although they are not as strong as the preceding in my judgment: 

Boston University: a solid department (top 50ish in the US), with a strong commitment to the history of philosophy, including Kant and the post-Kantian Continental traditions (e.g., Daniel Dahlstrom, Sally Sedgwick). BU has one well-known Nietzsche specialist (Paul Katsafanas, though he is pushing a rather distinctive, and to my mind, implausible line about Nietzsche these days, though I still highly commend several of his earlier papers that we've discussed on this blog in the past--but students sympatico to his approach would no doubt find him an excellent person with whom to work). 

Stanford University: a very strong department (top 10ish in the US), with two senior faculty who have done important work on Nietzsche: Lanier Anderson and Nadeem Hussain. In the past, I would have put Stanford in the top group, but Nadeem tells me he's not really working much on Nietzsche anymore. Also strong in ancient philosophy and, with Anderson and Michael Friedman, also very good for Kant. The department's center of gravity, judging from its PhD graduates, does appear to be more in logic, language, mind, metaphysics and epistemology. 

University College London: a good department (top 10 in the UK), with two faculty who publish on Nietzsche: Sebastian Gardner and Tom Stern. Gardner is also a major scholar of Kant and German Idealism. Gardner is excellent, Stern's work is weak. 

University of Essex: a narrow department, but strongly focused on Kant and the post-Kantian Continental traditions. One well-known Nietzsche specialist on faculty: Beatrice Han-Pile. 

University of Southampton: A solid but not top 15 UK department, with a particular strength in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche--most notably Christopher Janaway, but others in philosophy or cognate units include David Owen, Aaron Ridley, and Tracy Strong. Note that Strong is in his mid-70s.

For a student looking to do a terminal M.A. first, s/he might consider any of the UK departments (where students first do a master's degree or B.Phil. before doing the PhD), or, in the U.S., Georgia State University remains far and away the best choice: in addition to solid coverage of moral, political and legal philosophy, ancient philosophy, and philosophy of mind and cognitive science, the department has two well-known scholars who work on Nietzsche (Jessica Berry and Gregory Moore), and two other faculty who work on Kant and post-Kantian German philosophy (Sebastian Rand and Eric Wilson). 

The best Nietzsche scholar on the European Continent is Mattia Riccardi, now at the University of Porto in Portugal. Also in Portugal, The New University of Lisbon continues to have a lively philosophical community interested in Nietzsche led by Joao Constancio. Andreas Urs Summer at the University of Freiburg in Germany is doing interesting historical and philological work, albeit of somewhat less clear philosophical import.

Discussing "Moral Psychology with Nietzsche" online at Trinity College Dublin

 Details here.

Where to go for postgraduate study of Nietzsche, 2020 edition

 The recommendations are premised on three assumptions about what is needed to do good PhD work on Nietzsche:  (1) a strong, general philosophical education; (2) good Nietzsche scholars to supervise the work; and (3) a philosophical environment in which one can get a solid grounding in the history of philosophy, especially ancient philosophy, Kant, and post-Kantian German philosophy.

With that in mind, here's the eight programs I'd strongly recommend for someone certain they plan to focus on Nietzsche:

Birkbeck College, University of London:  a solid department overall, albeit a bit narrow (top 15ish in the UK), unusual in having two very substantial Nietzsche scholars on faculty, Ken Gemes [who is only part-time] and Andrew Huddleston.  If one reaches out to faculty at other London colleges, one can also get the necessary historical education in other figures.

Brown University:  a strong department overall (top 20 in the US), with one leading Nietzsche specialist, Bernard Reginster, and two other senior faculty with sympathetic interests in Nietzsche (Paul Guyer and Charles Larmore).  Guyer and Larmore, as well as Mary Louise Gill, provide strong coverage of other important periods and figures for purposes of studying Nietzsche.

Columbia University:  a very strong department overall (top 10ish in the US), with three senior faculty with interests in Nietzsche:  Taylor Carman, Robert Gooding-Williams, and Frederick Neuhouser (though only Gooding-Williams is really a specialist).  With these three, as well as Lydia Goehr and (part-time) Axel Honneth, also one of the best places in the U.S. to study the Continental traditions in philosophy.  Also offers strong coverage of ancient philosophy and Kant.

New York University:  the best department in the Anglophone world, now with three senior faculty with serious interests in Nietzsche:  Robert Hopkins, John Richardson, and Tamsin Shaw (though only Richardson seems to be actively working on Nietzsche these days).  The department now also has strong coverage of ancient philosophy and through Richardson and Anja Jauernig good coverage of Kant and the post-Kantian Continental traditions.  Given the department's dominant strengths in other areas to date (e.g., metaphysics, philosophy of mind), so far there have been few students there working on Nietzsche or other post-Kantian figures--something a prospective student should investigate.

Oxford University:  a very strong faculty (top 3 in the Anglophone world), with strong coverage of ancient philosophy and the history of philosophy, with one significant senior Nietzsche scholar (Peter Kail) and one younger Nietzsche specialist (Alexander Prescott-Couch).  Stephen Mulhall, Joseph Schear and Mark Wrathall offer good coverage of other aspects of the post-Kantian Continental traditions, especially Heidegger and phenomenology.   Also outstanding in ancient philosophy.

Princeton University:  a very strong department overall (top 5ish in the US), with one leading figure in Nietzsche studies, Alexander Nehamas, who has supervised a number of students working on Nietzsche in recent years (e.g., Huddleston at Birbeck, above).  Also very strong in ancient philosophy, with other faculty in Philosophy or cognate departments offering some coverage of Kant and post-Kantian German philosophy (mostly 19th-century).  Note:  Nehamas is now in his early 70s, prospective students should make sure he plans on continuing to accept and supervise students.

University of California, Riverside:  a solid department overall (top 30ish in the US) and one of the best places in the U.S. to study the Continental traditions in philosophy with Maudemarie Clark (a leading Nietzsche specialist) and Pierre Keller, as well as Georgia Warnke in Political Science.  The department is especially notable for the way in which the study of the Continental traditions is closely integrated with the study of the rest of philosophy, to the enrichment of both.   (It's also a very collegial place, one of my favorite departments to visit in the country.)  There is also a large and impressive group of graduate students working on the post-Kantian traditions and/or interested in Nietzsche.

University of Chicago:  a strong, if somewhat idiosyncratic, department (top 20ish in the US), with particular strengths in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy and in Kant and post-Kantian German and French philosophy.  Chicago has to have more scholars interested in Nietzsche from more divergent points of view than anywhere else:  besides me, also Martha Nussbaum, Robert Pippin, David Wellbery, and (part-time still) James Conant and Michael Forster.  As with Riverside, there is a large group of students interested in Nietzsche (six of the eight PhD students I've worked closely with in the last half-dozen years have had serious Nietzsche interests, two have published on Nietzsche, and one is writing a dissertation with a significant Nietzsche component).  Note:  Most of Pippin's supervision has been of students working on Kant or Hegel.

University of Warwick:  a solid department overall (top 10 in the UK), with two senior scholars interested in Nietzsche (Keith Ansell-Pearson, Peter Poellner), although only Poellner's work seems to me of high quality.  Also has strong coverage generally of Kant and the post-Kantian Continental traditions (e.g., Quassim Cassam, Stephen Houlgate [who also is interested in Nietzsche]).

Here are some other departments a student interested in Nietzsche should certainly consider as well:

Boston University:  a solid department (top 50 in the US), with a strong commitment to the history of philosophy, including Kant and the post-Kantian Continental traditions (BU recently added Sally Sedgwick from Illinois/Chicago).  One well-known Nietzsche specialist (Paul Katsafanas, though he is pushing a rather distinctive, and to my mind, implausible line about Nietzsche these days, though I still highly commend several of his earlier papers that we've discussed on this blog in the past--but students sympatico to his approach would no doubt find him an excellent person with whom to work).

Stanford University: a  very strong department (top 10ish in the US), with two senior faculty who have done important work on Nietzsche:  Lanier Anderson and Nadeem Hussain.   In the past, I would have put Stanford in the top group, but Nadeem tells me he's not really working much on Nietzsche anymore.  Also strong in ancient philosophy and, with  Anderson and Michael Friedman, also very good for Kant.  The department's center of gravity, judging from its PhD graduates, does appear to be more in logic, language, mind, metaphysics and epistemology.

University of California, San Diego:  a strong department (top 20ish in the US), with two senior faculty interested in Nietzsche (Michael Hardimon and Donald Rutherford), and extensive coverage of ancient philosophy and Kant.  Recently added at the junior level Monique Wonderly, primarily a moral philosopher, but who also has an interest in and has published on Nietzsche.

University College London:  a good department (top 10 in the UK), with two faculty who publish on Nietzsche:  Sebastian Gardner and Tom Stern.  Gardner is also a major scholar of Kant and German Idealism.  Gardner is excellent, Stern's work is weak.

University of Essex:  a narrow department, but strongly focused on Kant and the post-Kantian Continental traditions.  One well-known Nietzsche specialist on faculty:  Beatrice Han-Pile.

University of Southampton:  A solid but not top 15 UK department, with a particular strength in  Schopenhauer and Nietzsche--most notably Christopher Janaway, but others in philosophy or cognate units include David Owen, Aaron Ridley, and Tracy Strong.  Note that Strong is in his mid-70s.

For a student looking to do a terminal M.A. first, s/he might consider any of the UK departments (where students first do a master's degree or B.Phil. before doing the PhD), or, in the U.S., Georgia State University remains far and away the best choice:  in addition to solid coverage of moral, political and legal philosophy, ancient philosophy, and philosophy of mind and cognitive science, the department has two well-known scholars who work on Nietzsche (Jessica Berry and Gregory Moore), and two other faculty who work on Kant and post-Kantian German philosophy (Sebastian Rand and Eric Wilson).

The best Nietzsche scholar on the European Continent is Mattia Riccardi, now at the University of Porto in Portugal.  Also in Portugal, The New University of Lisbon continues to have a lively philosophical community interested in Nietzsche led by Joao Constancio.  Andreas Urs Summer at the Unviersity of Freiburg in Germany is doing interesting historical and philological work, albeit of somewhat less clear philosophical import.

Jonathan Mitchell on Stern's "New Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche"

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews has just published this illuminating, and wholly accurate, review by Jonathan Mitchell (Mahchester) of the New Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche we noted a few months ago.  As Dr. Mitchell aptly observes at the start:

Given that it is billed as a companion, one would expect a balanced approach to debates in Nietzsche studies, alongside informative overviews. Unfortunately, the volume suffers from two central faults which undercut its ability to achieve this. On the one hand, a number of the chapters lack philosophical substance, reading more like discursive intellectual histories. On the other hand, the more philosophically inclined essays include misrepresentative snipes at 'analytic interpreters' of Nietzsche (mostly those notably absent from the volume).

We mentoned in October why the so-called "analytic" (i.e., philosophical) interpreters are missing from the volume.   Nietzsche studies has made huge progress in the last thirty years in scholarly and philosophical sophistication.  With a couple of exceptions, all this is absent from this companion, which is something like a return to "the bad old days" when Nietzsche scholars didn't need to know much about philosophy or philosophical problems and could hide behind confused blather about "masks" and perspectivism-as-relativism/idealism (see, e.g., Mitchell's discerning discussion of Stern's introductory materials to the volume).

Mitchell is good on Stephen Mulhall's embarrassing hatchet job on my views (which I had planned on letting pass in silence, but I'm grateful to Mitchell for pointing out the obvious errors), and on the Straussian esotericism implicit in Robert Pippin's essay on Beyond Good and Evil; as Mitchell writes:  "there is also a price that comes with seeing Nietzsche as always, rather than just sometimes, engaged in an esoteric meta-project of not just stating (albeit in suggestive and non-commital ways) his philosophical views, but always saying things for some never explicitly stated 'effects' ('what he is trying to do by saying it' [quoting Pippin]).  It makes the interpretive project closer to that of trying to uncover Nietzsche's 'hidden intentions,' something which lends itself to a form of speculation unconstrained by textual evidence."   Being constrained by textual evidence is hard work, of course.

I have not yet read Sebastian Gardner's essay (though plan to), which Mitchell discusses at length, and which sounds interesting, though it (unsurprisingly) reflects Gardner's Kantian predilections in reading Nietzsche, such as supposing that Nietzsche thinks there is any "guarantor of normativity."  Gardner's work is always instructive, and as longtime readers will know, I've discussed it in detail here in the past.

I also agree with Mitchell's praise for Michael Forster's essay on Nietzsche on free will; although I have some disagreements with Forster on this issue, Mitchell is exactly right that it is "a fine example of the required form and standard of content for a contribution to a companion."   I expect it's the one essay in the volume that will definitely get uptake in the scholarly literature going forward.

The community of Nietzsche scholars owes Dr. Mitchell a debt of gratitude for his critical eye, good philosophical judgment, and judicious assessments. 

ISNS Call for Papers: Oxford 2019 (June 30-July 1)

More information here:   http://www.internationalnietzsche.org/call-for-papers.html

The New Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche

I recently received a copy of The New Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche edited by Tom Stern.  The last Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, edited by Bernd Magnus and Kathleen Higgins, appeared in 1996, and did not have much impact:   although it included many then-prominent Anglophone Nietzsche scholars, none of the essays played much role in subsequent scholarship.

The striking thing about this New Cambridge Companion, in contrast to the earlier one, is that all the currently prominent Anglophone Nietzsche scholars are noticeably absent:  there are no contributions from Maudemarie Clark, Ken Gemes, Christopher Janaway, Bernard Reginster, and so on.  This is not accidental, and this blog actually played a role.  For longtime readers may recall my excoriation of Tom Stern's idiotic and sneering non-review of The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche back in 2014, which upset and offended many Nietzsche scholars.   After I published this, Hilary Gaskin, the Cambridge University Press philosophy editor, contacted me.  From her, I learned that Professor Stern had been commissioned to edit a New Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, and that he had planned to invite me to contribute; Gaskin wanted to find out whether I would still be open to contributing in light of my response to Stern's review of The Oxford Handbook.  I informed her that I was not, and after corresponding with other senior Nietzsche scholars, I found out I was not alone in this regard.

I confess I was initially astonished back in 2014 to learn that Stern--who had done relatively little work on Nietzsche and none of note--had been invited to edit The New Cambridge Companion, until I remembered that Gaskin is married to Raymond Geuss, who was Stern's dissertation adviser from Cambridge.  This is instructive about how academic corruption works, alas.

I have only begun perusing The New Cambridge Companion.   A number of the essays do seem to reflect Stern's view that Nietzsche was simply a sponge that soaked up whatever he happened to be reading, so that knowing what he read is somehow decisive for figuring out what his published work means.  Some of this detective work is interesting, but its philosophical import is less clear.   I may post more about particular essays that turn out to be of special note or interest.

Where to go to study Nietzsche, 2019 edition (REVISED 3 September 2019)

The recommendations are premised on three assumptions about what is needed to do good PhD work on Nietzsche:  (1) a strong, general philosophical education; (2) good Nietzsche scholars to supervise the work; and (3) a philosophical environment in which one can get a solid grounding in the history of philosophy, especially ancient philosophy, Kant, and post-Kantian German philosophy.

With that in mind, here's the eight programs I'd strongly recommend for someone certain they plan to focus on Nietzsche:

Birkbeck College, University of London:  a solid department overall, albeit a bit narrow (top 10ish in the UK), unusual in having two very substantial Nietzsche scholars on faculty, Ken Gemes and Andrew Huddleston.  If one reaches out to faculty at other London colleges, one can also get the necessary historical education in other figures.

Brown University:  a strong department overall (top 20 in the US), with one leading Nietzsche specialist, Bernard Reginster, and two other senior faculty with sympathetic interests in Nietzsche (Paul Guyer and Charles Larmore).  Guyer and Larmore, as well as Mary Louise Gill, provide strong coverage of other important periods and figures for purposes of studying Nietzsche.

Columbia University:  a very strong department overall (top 10ish in the US), with three senior faculty interested in Nietzsche:  Taylor Carman, Robert Gooding-Williams, and Frederick Neuhouser (though only Gooding-Williams is really a specialist).  With these three, as well as Lydia Goehr and (part-time) Axel Honneth, also one of the best places in the U.S. to study the Continental traditions in philosophy.  Also offers strong coverage of ancient philosophy and Kant.

New York University:  the best department in the Anglophone world, now with three senior faculty with serious interests in Nietzsche:  Robert Hopkins, John Richardson, and Tamsin Shaw (though only Richardson seems to be actively working on Nietzsche these days).  The department now also has strong coverage of ancient philosophy and through Richardson, Anja Jauernig and Beatrice Longuenesse, has strong coverage of Kant and the post-Kantian Continental traditions.  (I'm told Longuenesse may retire soon, something prospective students should investigate).  Given the department's dominant strengths in other areas to date (e.g., metaphysics, philosophy of mind), so far there have been few students there working on Nietzsche or other post-Kantian figures--something a prospective student should investigate.

Oxford University:  a very strong department (top 5 in the Anglophone world), with strong coverage of ancient philosophy and the history of philosophy, with one significant senior Nietzsche scholar (Peter Kail) and one younger Nietzsche specialist (Alexander Prescott-Couch).  Stephen Mulhall, Joseph Schear and Mark Wrathall offer good coverage of other aspects of the post-Kantian Continental traditions, especially Heidegger and phenomenology.

Princeton University:  a very strong department overall (top 5ish in the US), with one leading figure in Nietzsche studies, Alexander Nehamas, who has supervised a number of students working on Nietzsche in recent years (e.g., Huddleston at Birbeck, above).  Also very strong in ancient philosophy, with other faculty in Philosophy or cognate departments offering some coverage of Kant and post-Kantian German philosophy (mostly 19th-century).  Note:  Nehamas is now in his early 70s, prospective students should make sure he plans on continuing to accept and supervise students.

University of California, Riverside:  a solid department overall (top 30ish in the US) and one of the best places in the U.S. to study the Continental traditions in philosophy with Maudemarie Clark (a leading Nietzsche specialist) and Pierre Keller, as well as Georgia Warnke in Political Science.  The department is especially notable for the way in which the study of the Continental traditions is closely integrated with the study of the rest of philosophy, to the enrichment of both.   (It's also a very collegial place, one of my favorite departments to visit in the country.)  There is also a large and impressive group of graduate students working on the post-Kantian traditions and/or interested in Nietzsche.

University of Chicago:  a strong, if somewhat idiosyncratic, department (top 20ish in the US), with particular strengths in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy and in Kant and post-Kantian German and French philosophy.  Chicago has to have more scholars interested in Nietzsche from more divergent points of view than anywhere else:  besides me, also Martha Nussbaum, Robert Pippin, David Wellbery, and (part-time still) James Conant and Michael Forster.  As with Riverside, there is a large group of students interested in Nietzsche (six of the eight PhD students I've worked closely with in the last half-dozen years have had serious Nietzsche interests, two have published on Nietzsche, and one is writing a dissertation with a significant Nietzsche component).  Note:  Most of Pippin's supervision has been of students working on Kant or Hegel.

University of Warwick:  a solid department overall (top 10 in the UK), with two senior scholars interested in Nietzsche (Keith Ansell-Pearson, Peter Poellner) from different perspectives, and strong coverage generally of Kant and the post-Kantian Continental traditions (e.g., Quassim Cassam, Stephen Houlgate [who also is interested in Nietzsche]).

Here are some other departments a student interested in Nietzsche should certainly consider as well:

Boston University:  a solid department (top 50 in the US), with a strong commitment to the history of philosophy, including Kant and the post-Kantian Continental traditions (BU recently added Sally Sedgwick from Illinois/Chicago).  One well-known Nietzsche specialist (Paul Katsafanas, though he is pushing a rather distinctive, and to my mind, implausible line about Nietzsche these days, though I still highly commend several of his earlier papers that we've discussed on this blog in the past--but students sympatico to his approach would no doubt find him an excellent person with whom to work).

Stanford University: a  very strong department (top 10ish in the US), with two senior faculty who have done important work on Nietzsche:  Lanier Anderson and Nadeem Hussain.   In the past, I would have put Stanford in the top group, but Nadeem tells me he's not really working much on Nietzsche anymore.  Also strong in ancient philosophy and, with  Anderson and Michael Friedman, also very good for Kant.  The department's center of gravity, judging from its PhD graduates, does appear to be more in logic, language, mind, metaphysics and epistemology.

University of California, San Diego:  a strong department (top 20ish in the US), with two senior faculty interested in Nietzsche (Michael Hardimon and Donald Rutherford), and extensive coverage of ancient philosophy and Kant.  Recently added at the junior level Monique Wonderly, primarily a moral philosopher, but who also has an interest in and has published on Nietzsche.

University College London:  a good department (top 10 in the UK), with three faculty with interests in Nietzsche:  Sebastian Gardner, Mark Kalderon, and Tom Stern--though for none does it appear to be a primary interest, except perhaps Stern (though I am not a fan of his work).  Gardner is also a major scholar of Kant and German Idealism.

University of Essex:  a narrow department, but strongly focused on Kant and the post-Kantian Continental traditions.  One well-known Nietzsche specialist on faculty:  Beatrice Han-Pile.

University of Southampton:  A solid but not top 15 UK department, with a particular strength in  Schopenhauer and Nietzsche--most notably Christopher Janaway, but others in philosophy or cognate units include David Owen, Aaron Ridley, and Tracy Strong.  Note that Strong is in his mid-70s.

For a student looking to do a terminal M.A. first, s/he might consider any of the UK departments (where students first do a master's degree or B.Phil. before doing the PhD), or, in the U.S., Georgia State University remains far and away the best choice:  in addition to solid coverage of moral, political and legal philosophy, ancient philosophy, and philosophy of mind and cognitive science, the department has two well-known scholars who work on Nietzsche (Jessica Berry and Gregory Moore), and two other faculty who work on Kant and post-Kantian German philosophy (Sebastian Rand and Eric Wilson).


The best Nietzsche scholar on the European Continent is Mattia Riccardi, now at the University of Porto in Portugal.  Also in Portugal, The New University of Lisbon continues to have a lively philosophical community interested in Nietzsche led by Joao Constancio.

'Nietzsche: The Truth is Terrible'

Everything you need to know in just 2,500 words at the Times Literary Supplement.  (This is not behind a paywall.)

The decline of European Journal of Philosophy as a Nietzsche venue

In thinking about significant Nietzsche publications for my last post, I was struck that none of the papers in EJP in recent years was even on my list of tentative candidates.  In the 1990s and early-to-mid-2000s, many excellent Nietzsche-related papers appeared, but there's been a marked decline in quality lately; a couple should never have passed peer review at a mediocre journal.  I'm not entirely sure what happened; the EJP decision to expand the number of pages it publishes each volume may have led to a lower level of selectivity.  A more likely explanation is just bad choices in referees.  And it may be that the supply of good papers has been choked off by the revitalization of Journal of Nietzsche Studies, the rejuvenation of Inquiry, and thee large number of high quality edited volumes related to Nietzsche.   EJP should definitely remain on the radar as a place to publish Nietzsche papers, but hopefully they will be more selective going forward.

10 books and/or articles related to Nietzsche you should have read in the last ten years

Since it's early 2018, I will treat the benchmark as 2007, but here are the books and/or articles I got the most from, and that anyone doing work on Nietzsche should have read and thought about seriously during the last decade.  These are in alphabetical order.

Jessica Berry, Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2011).  I was not ultimately persuaded by Berry's ambitious thesis, but the book is a model of how to think about Nietzsche in relationship to ancient Greek philosophy, and displays a masterful command of both.

Maudemarie Clark & David Dudrick, The Soul of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil (Cambridge University Press, 2012).   Another book I have many disagreements with (I discuss some of them here), and even if you share my worries, there's still a huge amount to learn from the detailed analysis of the preface and first chapter of BGE and the many philosophical issues raised.

Christopher Janaway, Beyond Selflessness:  Reading Nietzsche's Genealogy (Oxford University Press, 2007).  I am sympathetic to many of the arguments here, though was somewhat mystified by his mischaracterization of my treatment of Nietzsche's naturalism; our views are in fact rather close, once the confusions are cleared up.   Almost every chapter has something to teach the reader, including the specialist.  (I reviewed the book here.)

Nadeem Hussain, "Honest Illusions:  Valuing for Nietzsche's Free Spirits," in B. Leiter & N. Sinhababu (eds.), Nietzsche and Morality (Oxford University Press, 2007).  Beautifully done exploration of "fictionalism" in Nietzsche's metaethics, though one should also see Hussain's later view ("Nietzsche's Metaethical Stance," in K. Gemes & J. Richardson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche [2013]), which is more skeptical about whether the textual evidence demands supports ascribing a particular semantic view to Nietzsche.

Paul Katsafanas, "Nietzsche's Philosophical Psychology," also in Gemes & Richardson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche (2013).  This deservedly influential paper has become the standard point of reference for thinking about Nietzsche's "drive psychology," and needs to be read by everyone interested in issues of moral psychology in Nietzsche.


Mattia Riccardi, "Inner Opacity:  Nietzsche on Introspection and Agency," Inquiry 58 (2015):  221-243 and "Nietzsche on the Superficiality of Consciousness," in M. Dries (ed.), Nietzsche on Consciousness and the Embodied Mind (de Gruyter, 2018).  Both of these brilliant papers, which combine scholarly care and erudition with philosophical sophistication, have shed new light on Nietzsche's arguments for epiphenomenalism about consciousness.   I eagerly await the book manuscript on Nietzsche's philosophical psychology that Riccardi is presently completing and which will surely become a classic in the secondary literature.

Donald Rutherford, "Freedom as a Philosophical Ideal:   Nietzsche and His Antecedents," Inquiry 54 (2011):  512-540.  This is the best paper on the vexed question of Nietzsche's understanding of "freedom," tying it convincingly to the kind of view one also finds in Spinoza, one in which determinism or fatalism is reconciled with a rather different notion of "freedom" than one finds in the Humean or Kantian traditions in the modern era.

Tamsin Shaw,"The 'Last Man' Problem:  Nietzsche and Weber on Political Attitudes Towards Suffering," in M. Knoll & B. Stocker (eds.), Nietzsche as Political Philosopher (de Gruyter, 2014).  This extremely suggestive paper elucidates part of what Weber found so significant about Nietzsche, and in the process sheds light on a central Nietzschean concern, the affirmation of life not in spite of, but because, it involves suffering.  (This paper was the original stimulus for my own take on these issues in Nietzsche.)
 
Now that's only 9, not 10, books/articles, and I'm not sure I could single out a 10th as helpful and important as these papers have been for my own work.   Readers are invited to suggest their own; include your full name or your comment will not appear, and please state the reasons you found the book or article especially illuminating.  Anything with a publication date of 2007 or after is eligible.