I just discovered that the program of the "Nietzsche and Ethics" conference--which is the subject of the 14th Annual Meeting of the UK's Friedrich Nietzsche Society, which will be at the University of Sussex this year, September 10-12, 2004--is now on-line here: click on "programme" for the schedule, and "abstracts" for short summaries of many of the papers to be presented.
The conference has shaped up rather well, it seems to me. Several papers look to be very interesting (I just hope they don't conflict on the final schedule!): Daniel Came (Oxford) on "Art and Morality in Nietzsche's Birith of Tragedy," Edward Harcourt (Kent) on "Nietzsche and Eudaemonism," Christopher Janaway (Birkbeck) on "Nietzsche and Paul Ree on the Origins of Moral Feelings," and James Wilson (Birkbeck) on "Nietzsche and Equality" all caught my attention. I am looking forward, as well, to spending time with some Nietzsche scholars whose work I've read, but whom I've never met, including Keith Ansell-Pearson (Warwick), Aaron Ridley (Southampton), Robin Small (Auckland), Henry Staten (Washington), and Volker Gerhardt (Humboldt). And, of course, there is a special interest for me in the various papers that will take issue with my views on Nietzsche: Ken Gemes (Birkbeck) on "Nietzsche on Free Will, Action and Morality," Paul Loeb (Puget Sound) on "Finding the Ubermensch in Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality," Thomas Meyer (Temple) on "Declining Decadence: On Fatalism and Self-Creation in the Later Nietzsche," and Barry Stocker (Yeditepe [Turkey]) on "Nietzsche's Moral Lessons," which looks to be a sustained attack on my Nietzsche on Morality (Routledge, 2002). And I'm sure that for many, myself included, the plenary address by Maudemarie Clark (Colgate)--who has done more than anyone to make Nietzsche studies philosophically substantial--on "Nietzsche on Moral Objectivity" will be a highlight of the conference.
For those interested, my own plenary address will be on "Nietzsche's Theory of the Will" (which I expect will be my contribution to Ansell-Pearson's Blackwell Companion to Nietzsche); here is the draft of the opening paragraphs, which can serve as an abstract:
"It is well-known that Nietzsche has provocative views about the nature of the will and free will. It is less often appreciated that his views on these topics have considerable philosophical merit. Nietzsche not only anticipates and lends argumentative support to the new wave of non-libertarian incompatibilism in writers like Derk Pereboom (2001) and Galen Strawson (1994)—the view that free will is incompatible with 'determinism' and that there is no non-deterministic account of free will in the offing—but his theory of the will and free will also wins support from recent results in empirical psychology. As a philosophical naturalist, Nietzsche thought of his theoretical endeavors as proceeding in tandem with empirical inquiry.... As befits his self-designation as 'the first psychologist,' it turns out that Nietzsche anticipated results that psychologists only arrived at a century later.
"In section 124 of Daybreak, Nietzsche sets the primary issues that shall occupy us here in trying to understand Nietzsche’s theory of the will. He writes:
'We laugh at him who steps out of his room at the moment when the sun steps out of its room, and then says: “I will that the sun shall rise”; and at him who cannot stop a wheel, and says: “I will that it shall roll”; and at him who is thrown down in wrestling, and says: “here I lie, but I will lie here!” But, all laughter aside, are we ourselves ever acting any differently whenever we employ the expression “I will”?'
"I take it to be uncontroversial that this last question is rhetorical, and that the obvious answer to this question is: 'no, it is no different at all.' Should anyone be confused by the interrogative form Nietzsche employs (and, alas, some scholars have been so misled on other occasions ), other textual evidence will be adduced soon enough that makes it clear that when we act and say 'I will,' it is no different, and no more ridiculous, than when he 'who steps out of his room at the moment when the sun steps out of its room... says "I will that the sun shall rise.”'
"If it is really true that this analogy holds, then it follows that the experience of willing which precedes an action does not track an actual causal relationship: the experience of willing is epiphenomenal with respect to the action. If that is so, then an adequate account of Nietzsche’s theory of the will and action requires us to get clear about three claims: first, the phenomenology of 'willing' an action, the experience we have which leads us (causally) to conceive of ourselves as exercising our will (to say 'I will'); second, Nietzsche’s arguments that the experiences picked out by the phenomenology are not causally connected to the resulting action (or, alternatively, not connected in a way that would underwrite ascriptions of moral responsibility); and third, Nietzsche’s account of the actual causal genesis of action."
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