Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

The new Cambridge "Elements" series (UPDATED)

These short "booklets" are proliferating across many different subjects in philosophy, and while some have been pretty bad, others have attracted serious authors and look more promising.  The Elements volumes offer one very attractive feature for authors (especially junior authors), which is that the volume is made available for free downloads the first two weeks after publication.  But they have another feature which is very odd and very unattractive for more senior authors:  Cambridge does not pay royalties, just a flat fee ($250 recently).   Despite this, Cambridge University Press charges $20-25 per booklet!   

Nietzsche on nihilism

Philosopher Kaitlyn Creasy comments.  I agree with a lot of this, although I don't think it captures the causes of the risk of "suicidal nihilism" that Nietzsche discusses in the Third Essay of the Genealogy.

Pope Benedict's engagement with Nietzsche

This is curious.  His rejoinders to Nietzsche are remarkably feeble, and suggest his engagement did not run very deep--perhaps unsurprisingly!

(Thanks to Robert McGarvey for the pointer.)

Two weeks until the submission deadline for the 6th meeting of the International Society of Nietzsche Studies in Atlanta

Details here.  Many PhD students have had their papers chosen in the blind review process, including graduate students from Purdue, UC Riverside, Princeton, Chicago, Oxford, Warwick, Boston University, and Duke, among others.

"Philosophy in Focus" from OUP: 20th-century philosophy

OUP is making available free many articles (including mine on Williams's alleged debt to Nietzsche, which is how I learned of this).  The contributions range widely, covering Anscombe, Adorno, David Lewis, Frege, and many others.

"Effective [sic] Altruists" treat girls like "meat" just like guys who don't posture so much

I think that's a fair summary of this:

EA circles...are widely incestous where people mix their work life (in EA cause areas), their often polyamorous love life and social life in one amalgomous mix without strict separations. This is the default status quo. This means that if you’re a reasonably attractive woman entering an EA community, you get a ton of sexual requests to join polycules, often from poly and partnered men. Some of these men control funding for projects and enjoy high status in EA communities and that means there are real downsides to refusing their sexual advances and pressure to say yes, especially if your career is in an EA cause area or is funded by them.....

From experience it appears that, a ‘no’ once said is not enough for many men in EA. Having to keep replenishing that ‘no’ becomes annoying very fast, and becomes harder to give informed consent when socializing in the presence of alcohol/psychedelics. It puts your safety at risk. From experience, EA as a community, has very little respect for monogamy and many men, often competing with each other, will persuade you to join polyamory using LessWrong style jedi mindtricks while they stand to benefit from the erosion of your boundaries. (Edit: I have personally experienced this more than three times in less than one year of attending EA events and that is far too many times. )

CFP for the International Society of Nietzsche Studies #6 in Atlanta

The CFP is here.   ISNS is the premier forum for Nietzsche scholarship in North America and Europe.  Please submit!

Narratives that engage the emotions, not arguments, are more effective at producing charitable behavior

Interesting study, confirming what all Humeans and Nietzscheans already suspected.  As Nietzsche quips (in Twilight of the Idols), "Nothing is easier to erase than a dialectical effect."

UPDATE:  More thoughts, on Twitter, from philosopher Matt Lindauer (Brooklyn Coll/CUNY).  (Link now fixed.)

Nietzsche on conscience

Philosopher Christopher Janaway (Southampton) comments.

"Some Realism about Political and Legal Philosophy"

A draft now on SSRN; the abstract below the fold:

Analytic/Continental divide in the journals: a comment on Schwitzgebel's latest study

Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) has posted another of his interesting empirical studies, this time of references to major "Continental" figures like Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida in four leading Anglophone journals:  Philosophical Review, Journal of Philosophy, Mind, and Nous.   This chart is a useful representation of what he found:

See Schwitzbgebel's post for similar charts about Heidegger and other Continental figures.  A few thoughts below the fold.

Nietzsche's fatalism and existentialism

I discuss this and cognate topics with Charlie Taben as part of his series at the APA Blog.

Abortion, religion and SCOTUS, redux

A propos this, Professor Rick Garnett (Law, Notre Dame) writes:

[I]t is not clear why the claim "human fetuses are moral subjects and this fact constrains what should be done with and to them" is any more "religious", or any less "moral", than the claim "all human beings are moral equals, regardless of race, and should be treated as such in law." 

The only people who are obsessed with protecting fertilized eggs and early stage fetuses are religious people, usually of a certain orthodox variety (mostly Christian in this country).  Professor Garnett is correct that his second claim about human equality also has a religious origin, which is why Nietzsche hoped that kind of moral egalitarianism would die along with God.  Unlike Nietzsche, I'm a moral egalitarian, despite being the least religious person in every other respect:   as Nietzsche also understood (in other contexts), moral attitudes are matters of deeply ingrained habits of feeling, that easily outlast their supposed justifications.   Fortunately, the egalitarian attitudes have, so far, survived the death of God:  in that sense, moral egalitarianism has become secularized.  But the pro-embryo movement has not become secularized in that way (where are its secular adherents?  why are 99.9% of its proponents religious?), and it really defies credulity for anyone to suggest that a conservative Catholic upbringing would not produce profound antipathy towards abortion that would influence, perhaps not consciously, how a judge approaches any case that presents an opportunity to restrict its legal availability.

ADDENDUM:  Here's what conservative Catholics would really like the super-legislature to do!  I trust even Professor Garnett would acknowledge the role of religious conviction in that position.

Talking about Nietzsche with Dylan Aames

Here, on a new series from Mr. Aames, who is a comedian, writer, and producer (and who has a longstanding interest in Nietzsche).  It was an enjoyable and wide-ranging discussion about Nietzsche, and pitched at an introductory level.

On Wittgenstein's early private notebooks

Philosopher Kieran Setiya (MIT) comments; an excerpt:

With rare exceptions, analytic philosophy cannot be read as poetry. If it has value, it’s not the value of artistic achievement, unless perhaps in the medium of thought. Nor does analytic philosophy explore “the problem of life.” There’s plenty of work in applied philosophy, including ethics, engaging with practical questions—climate change, democracy, the treatment of non-human animals. But these are not the sorts of problems Wittgenstein fought. For the most part, analytic philosophy is detached, at least in its self-image, from the personal struggles of philosophers.

Not just philosophy, but philosophers: that is what these notebooks help us to see. A philosophy of philosophers, even—shown, if not said.

More on Putin and Ukraine

On the earlier thread, reader Boris Dagaev posted this:

Understandably, some readers of this blog are not completely satisfied with Stanovaya's analysis, which was written for the subscribers of her Telegram channel who are familiar with her work, and thus is limited in scope.

To provide a wider historical perspective (starting with 2007), I've translated the first part of today's article by another Russian political scientist, Kirill Shamiev. I'm hoping it would clarify some coordinated strategic considerations and tactical moves made by Putin's regime over the past few years.

You can find the translation here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oUHox2ooGCkk6g3GzB69aboqUUSHiJFgEDEM8_2I3Fk/edit?usp=sharing

By contrast, Scott Sagan, a political science professor at Stanford, here presumes (but does not argue for) the "Putin is a madman" view, and its alarming implications.  (Thanks to Jeff McMahan for the pointer.)

This is a context in which it pays, as Nietzsche says, to remember that objectivity and knowledge may emerge from having "one's pro and contra in one's power, and...[shifting] them in and out:  so that one knows how to make precisely the difference in perspectives and affective interpretations useful for knowledge."  So reading these two different perspectives on Putin and Ukraine, what can we conclude?

Blast from the past: "The conservatives of all ages are thoroughly dishonest"

Back in 2011, but the point is timeless.

"Nietzsche on Morality" (2nd edition) now available in Japanese...

...thanks to the great work of Yuma Oto.  Dr. Oto tells me that, "The Japanese title is 『ニーチェの道徳哲学と自然主義: 『道徳の系譜学』を読み解く』(which means, Nietzsche’s Moral Philosophy and Naturalism: Reading On the Genealogy of Morality)."  It's available on Japanese Amazon.

 

Most cited Anglophone books on Hegel and on Nietzsche...

...according to Google Scholar.

Total citations--Hegel books in English

Rank	Author	Book	Year published	Citations
1	Charles Taylor (McGill, emeritus)	Hegel and Modern Society	1979	1480
2	Robert Pippin (Chicago)	Hegel’s Idealism	1989	1260
3	Terry Pinkard (Georgetown)	Hegel’s Phenomenology:  The Sociality of Reason	1994	1120
4	Allen Wood (Indiana)	Hegel’s Ethics	1990	1110
5	Robert Pippin (Chicago)	Hegel’s Practical Philosophy	2008	760

Citations by year

Rank	Author	Book	Year published	Citations per year since publication
1	Robert Pippin (Chicago)	Hegel’s Practical Philosophy	2008	59
2	Frederick Neuhouser (Barnard/Columbia)	Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory	2009	53
3	Terry Pinkard (Georgetown)	Hegel’s Phenomenology:  The Sociality of Reason	1994	42
4	Robert Pippin (Chicago)	Hegel’s Idealism	1989	39
5	Allen Wood (Indiana)	Hegel’s Ethical Thought	1990	36

Richard Marshall interviews Mattia Riccardi (Porto) about Nietzsche's philosophical psychology...

...at 3:16 AM.

Nietzsche blog

For those interested, there are (finally) a couple of new posts, including the updated annual guide to post-graduate studies.

Discussing Nietzsche, moral psychology, naturalism, and related topics...

...with Ricardo Lopes at The Dissenter.  The particular focus is my Moral Psychology with Nietzsche, but we ranged over other issues as well.

Review of Tom Stern's "Nietzsche's Ethics" now out at...

...Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.  Only a few minor edits from the version posted earlier.

"How Not to Read Nietzsche's Ethics: The Case of Thomas Stern"

This review, which will appear in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, concerns a very weak volume in the Cambridge Elements series; I assume other volumes in that series are more serious and more helpful to students.  (On Stern's prior efforts, see this.)  The first paragraph, a middle paragraph, and the last paragraph of the review:

This thin book, in the new Cambridge Elements series, purports to “introduce” Nietzsche’s ethics in his “late works,” meaning from 1886 until his breakdown in early January 1889.  This period includes such major works as Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morality, as well as very late works that show some signs of impending insanity, like The Antichrist.  Stern never argues that the “late ethics” is discontinuous with Nietzsche’s pre-1886 writings about morality, he simply asserts it.   According to Stern, Nietzsche’s late ethics consists of a descriptive thesis (“Power seeking….is biologically essential” for “living things” [6]) and a normative command (“it is ethical to further the goals of Life and it is unethical to impede them” [11]) [the "Life Theory"].   No text is ever adduced in which Nietzsche says the latter; we return to the ambiguous evidence for the former.  Stern also claims, without any argument or evidence, that the “power-seeking force” is what Nietzsche variously calls “’Life,’ ‘nature,’ ‘will,’ ‘will to life’’ or the organic realm” (6) [footnote omitted]....

Nietzsche, Nietzsche, Nietzsche

Someone actually went to the trouble to produce this funny montage (based on this lecture at Lund):

There's a lot of time to burn on the Internet!

"Two Pessimisms in Mill"

I commend this important paper in Utilitas by one of our PhD students, Joshua Fox, who is defending his splendid dissertation on pessimism in Mill, Schopenhauer and  Nietzsche next month.  The paper, which draws on dissertation material, sheds fascinating and new light on an aspects of Mill's ethics that I've not seen addressed before.  (A different part of the project, related to Nietzsche, is found in this paper, which Nietzsche scholars will want to read.)

"Nietzsche Against Marx on the Causes of Suffering"

An early and rough draft of a project I'm still thinking about.  Here's the abstract:

Marx and Nietzsche, the two lodestars of modern philosophical anthropology, differ most interestingly not in their moral outlooks--which are indeed contradictory--but in their explanatory methods. Marx has, as it were, no psychology, only an anthropology and economics, while Nietzsche relies almost exclusively on explanation in terms of individual psychology, appearing at times willfully blind to social and economic causes. This difference is most apparent in their contrasting approaches to human suffering. Marx understands suffering to be primarily a consequence of socio-economic circumstances, while Nietzsche traces it primarily to defects in individual psychology and physiology (the latter manifesting themselves at the psychological level). To put it crudely, for Nietzsche, most people are by nature “sick” and thus disposed to suffer, regardless of socio-economic circumstances, while for Marx, people’s suffering is an artifact of their socio-economic circumstances, and thus amenable to amelioration.

The instinctive striving for "herd-organization"

The photo below reminded me of this observation of Nietzsche's (On the Genealogy of Morality III:18):  "Out of a longing to shake off the dull listlessness and the feeling of weakness, all the sick, the diseased strive instinctively for herd-organization...."

 

 

"Moral Psychology with Nietzsche" should be out any day now in paperback...

...and you can preorder it now.

And from a recent review by Paul Loeb in the January 2021 Journal of the History of Philosophy:

Brian Leiter’s second book on Nietzsche brings together ideas and arguments that have already had a significant influence on the field through their earlier formulations in his articles from the past two decades. It is thus indispensable reading for anyone interested in Leiter’s evolving project of showing that Nietzsche has the correct naturalistic approach to issues in moral philosophy and moral psychology. As usual with Leiter’s scholarship, this monograph is extremely clear, densely argued, and philosophically sophisticated.

"God is dead" and with Him goes moral egalitarianism

I return to Brain in a Vat to discuss these themes in Nietzsche (related to this paper).

International Society for Nietzsche Studies meeting

What was to have been the 5th annual meeting was postponed due to the COVID disaster; it will now take place in Oxford in June 2022.   The deadline for the CFP is next January, so plenty of time to submit for those who are interested.

I discuss "Moral Psychology with Nietzsche" at Trinity College Dublin...

...here, with Professors Donna Lyons (TCD), Brian O'Connor (University College Dublin), and Alexander Prescott-Couch (Oxford).   If you haven't read the book (which will be out in paperback in Spring 2021), my essay for the Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology will give you a pretty good overview of the main themes.

(As an aside, Professor Lyons has been running a delightful workshop series discussing recent books with authors, mostly by law professors, but some others too.

Where to go to study Nietzsche as a graduate student (mostly Anglophone world), 2020

I updated my annual recommendations here.

On the will to truth and the will to meaning in Nietzsche

Philosopher Ken Gemes (Birkbeck) comments.

Notre Dame faculty (but none from the law school) call on Judge Barrett to step aside until after the election...

...for the good of the country.  She won't, of course.  First, she knows that if she were to withdraw, the Republicans would push through someone else.  Second, she believes that her approach to judicial decision-making is the correct one and ought to be on the Supreme Court.   Or, as a German philospher once remarked, life itself is the will to power.

Best books on Nietzsche, an addendum...

...over at the Five Books website, and with thanks to Nigel Warburton for suggesting it.

A young person gets the good news that "God is dead"

(Via Neil Sinhababu on Facebook.)

 

Plato and Nietzsche in conversation

This is amusing (not philosophically deep, however, or at least not the bit I watched) (it's also in German).

(Thanks to Guy Elgat for the pointer.)

"Nietzsche on Morality" to appear in Japanese

I'm really happy to have learned a couple of weeks ago that the second edition of my Nietzsche on Morality (Routledge 2015; 1st ed., 2002) will be published in Japanese by Shunjusha Co., Ltd. in Tokyo.  I owe this to the efforts of Nietzsche scholar Yuma Oto of Keio University (who has also studied at the University of Southampton), whom I had the good fortune to meet at the Lund conference last June.  In the past, my work has been translated into Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew, Greek, Slovak, Russian, Italian, and French, but this is a first for Japanese, so it's very exciting to be able to reach Japanese Nietzsche students and scholars!

International Society for Nietzsche Studies has cancelled its annual meeting, slated for Oxford in late June 2020

Announcement here.  ISNS will meet again next year in Oxford, on dates still to be determined.  We decided to act early because (a) the writing is on the wall, and (b) we don't want folks buying plane tickets.

"Nietzsche's Moral and Political Philosophy," revised at SEP

This is the third revision I've done since the entry first appeared in 2004.   This revision was more substantial than the last one, with a lot of new bibliographical entries and refinements of discussions in several sections, especially sections 1.2, 2, 3 and 4.

Jonathan Mitchell did not like Tom Stern's "New Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche"

From the review's conclusion:

Overall this volume is idiosyncratic and mixed. Instead of a state-of-the-art snapshot of Nietzsche-studies married with perspicuous introductions and overviews of central texts, many of the contributions lacked philosophical depth. Those that were of a more philosophical bent flirted with obscurity and verbosity, not infrequently straw-manning the so-called analytic [i.e., philosophical] interpretations. That being said, [Sebastian] Gardner's and [Michael] Forster's contributions are worth reading, the latter being a fine example of the required form and standard of content for a contribution to a companion. It was a shame that many of the other contributions fell short of this standard.

(For those interested in Nietzsche scholarship, I say a bit more at my Nietzsche blog.)

Call for papers for the 5th annual meeting of the International Society for Nietzsche Studies

MOVING TO FRONT FROM NOVEMBER 21, 2019:   PAPERS ARE DUE BY THE END OF THE MONTH

This will take place in Oxford on June 30 and July 1, 2020; the CFP is here.   Those who have participated in ISNS in the past have often remarked that these are the highest quality discussions of Nietzsche they have ever experienced at any conference.  Graduate students have done very well in the CFPs in the past, getting the majority of the slots.  (Please note that this year, those successful in the CFP will need to secure their own funding for travel expenses.)

Papers posted on-line in 2019

For those interested, here are links to the new and revised papers I posted on-line in 2019:

"The History of Philosophy Reveals that 'Great' Philosophy is Disguised Moral Advocacy:  A Nietzschean Case Against the Socratic Canon in Philosophy"

"Culture and Value in Nietzsche"

"Nietzsche's Naturalism:  Neither Liberal Nor Illiberal"

"Bernard Williams' Debt to Nietzsche: Real or Illusory?"

"Foucault as a Kind of Realist:  Genealogical Critique and the Debunking of the Human Sciences"

"Marx and Marxism" (with Lawrence Dallman)

"Legal Positivism as a Realist Theory of Law"

More evidence for the relativity of moral judgments, this time in the form of cross-cultural responses to variations on the Trolley Problem

Of course, moral realists will have their usual question-begging accounts that explain away these divergent responses, but putting the parochialism of Anglophone moral philosophers to one side, here are the results:

The researchers found that countries’ preferences differ widely, but they also correlate highly with culture and economics. For example, participants from collectivist cultures like China and Japan are less likely to spare the young over the old—perhaps, the researchers hypothesized, because of a greater emphasis on respecting the elderly.

Similarly, participants from poorer countries with weaker institutions are more tolerant of jaywalkers versus pedestrians who cross legally. And participants from countries with a high level of economic inequality show greater gaps between the treatment of individuals with high and low social status.

 

"Nietzsche, Trump, and Brexit"

You probably weren't expecting to find those three items together, but they are put there by my friend the philosopher Ken Gemes (Birkbeck/London) in this interesting talk.   Note that the introduction is in German, but Gemes delivers the lecture in English.   I think he gets one thing wrong about Nietzsche:  the fundamental problem for human beings is to find a meaning for inevitable suffering, not to find a meaning simpliciter, as Gemes claims.

"The History of Philosophy Reveals that 'Great' Philosophy is Disguised Moral Advocacy: A Nietzschean Case Against the Socratic Canon in Philosophy"

This paper appeared last year in Marcel van Ackern (ed.), Proceedings of the British Academy 214:  Philosophy and the Historical Perspective (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 185-199; the British Academy would not permit it to be posted until a year after publication, which time period has now elapsed.  Here is the abstract:

Instrumentalists think the history of philosophy is as relevant to philosophy as the history of physics is to physics: if past philosophical or physical theories are true, or help us get to the truth, then we should know about them, otherwise not. Skeptical instrumentalists think history fails on these counts, optimistic instrumentalists think it does not. By contrast “anti-philosophical” instrumentalists—like Marx, Nietszche, and Wittgenstein—are not simply skeptics, because the skeptics still believe there is something for philosophy to do, some knowledge it can produce, some truths it can reveal. The anti-philosophical philosophers think we should give up philosophy as traditionally conceived: the real lesson from the history of philosophy is that philosophy is “garbage,” or, as Nietzsche thought, disguised moral advocacy. For Nietzsche, this is the real lesson of the history of philosophy.

The discussion of Carnap's admiration for Nietzsche (in the course of his famous polemic against Heidegger) may interest a number of readers.

"Culture and Value in Nietzsche"

I've posted my review essay on Andrew Huddleston's instructive recent book on Nietzsche and culture; here's the abstract for those who might be interested:

This review essay discusses a recent book by Andrew Huddleston that examines Nietzsche's views on culture, in particular, culture understood as “the collective life of a people, understood as akin to a great work of art." Huddelston argues against “individualist” readers of Nietzsche (including this author) who hold that after the early 1870s, Nietzsche changes his view and “[i]nstead of reposing his hopes in culture…comes to occupy himself with the fate of a few great individuals” like Beethoven and Goethe. I argue that Huddleston's own evidence shows the individualist readings to be correct, although in the process Huddleston usefully illuminates the influence of Romanticism on Nietzsche's early work. I also discuss the relationship between culture and slavery, the idea of "decadence," and the objectivity of value in Nietzsche's work.

The last sentence of the essay:  "I learned a lot from this volume and I commend it to other Nietzsche scholars, especially those thinking about the role of 'culture' in his thought."

A music critic for a magazine writes about Nietzsche

As these things go, it's not awful, even though the author admits being brought up on "the French Nietzsche," one of the more appallingly confused fabrications to have attached itself to the philosopher.  (Later, the author describes Deleuze as key to "the French Nietzsche," which is unfair to Deleuze!)  The essay is partly a review of Sue Prideaux's book, but the author is sufficiently ignorant to not recognize the problems in her biography.  Perhaps tellingly, towards the end, the music critic writes:

Whenever I feel bewildered by endless interpretive skirmishes over the philosophical Antichrist, I return to Alexander Nehamas’s “Nietzsche: Life as Literature,” which appeared in 1985 and retains a commanding place on the near-infinite Nietzsche bookshelf. Nehamas, a Greek-American thinker steeped in classical studies, essentially made a virtue of Bertrand Russell’s dismissal of Nietzsche. The contradictions in Nietzsche’s writings cohere, Nehamas writes, if we look at him as a literary figure who worked within a philosophical context, and who crafted a persona that functions as a literary character of novelistic complexity.

This is actually a somewhat unfair gloss on Nehamas's book (which does not make "a virtue of Bertrand Russell's dismissal of Nietzsche"), but it is true, as I wrote long ago, that Nehamas's book (which, recall, appeared in 1985),

"Nietzsche's Naturalism: Neither Liberal Nor Illiberal"

This is a penultimate version of my contribution to the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Liberal Naturalism, being edited by Mario Del Caro and David Macarthur.