Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

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.

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

This is a revised version of the paper I gave in Lund last month at the excellent conference on Williams organized by Paul Russell (British Columbia/Lund).  There were some predictably first-rate papers by Stephen Darwall (Yale), Miranda Fricker (CUNY), Gideon Rosen (Princeton), and Russell, among others, but readers interested in moral philosophy and Williams will want to keep an eye out for work by Geraldine Ng (Reading) and Matthieu Queloz (Oxford), who also gave excellent talks.  My paper is very much a work in progress, so feedback from philosophers interested in Nietzsche and Bernard Williams is welcome.

Thus spake Nietzsche

Wenn die Unterdrückten, Niedergetretenen, Vergewaltigten aus der rachsüchtigen List der Ohnmacht heraus sich zureden: „lasst uns anders sein als die Bösen, nämlich gut! Und gut ist Jeder, der nicht vergewaltigt, der Niemanden verletzt, der nicht angreift, der nicht vergilt, der die Rache Gott übergiebt, der sich wie wir im Verborgenen hält, der allem Bösen aus dem Wege geht und wenig überhaupt vom Leben verlangt, gleich uns den Geduldigen, Demüthigen, Gerechten“ — so heisst das, kalt und ohne Voreingenommenheit angehört, eigentlich nichts weiter als: „wir Schwachen sind nun einmal schwach; es ist gut, wenn wir nichts thun, wozu wir nicht stark genug sind“ — aber dieser herbe Thatbestand, diese Klugheit niedrigsten Ranges, welche selbst Insekten haben (die sich wohl todt stellen, um nicht „zu viel“ zu thun, bei grosser Gefahr), hat sich Dank jener Falschmünzerei und Selbstverlogenheit der Ohnmacht in den Prunk der entsagenden stillen abwartenden Tugend gekleidet, gleich als ob die Schwäche des Schwachen selbst — das heisst doch sein Wesen, sein Wirken, seine ganze einzige unvermeidliche, unablösbare Wirklichkeit — eine freiwillige Leistung, etwas Gewolltes, Gewähltes, eine That, ein Verdienst sei.

    --On the Genealogy of Morality, I:13

Thus spake Nietzsche

Was ist vornehm? Was bedeutet uns heute noch das Wort »vornehm«? Woran verräth sich, woran erkennt man, unter diesem schweren verhängten Himmel der beginnenden Pöbelherrschaft, durch den Alles undurchsichtig und bleiern wird, den vornehmen Menschen? – Es sind nicht die Handlungen, die ihn beweisen, – Handlungen sind immer vieldeutig, immer unergründlich –; es sind auch die »Werke« nicht. Man findet heute unter Künstlern und Gelehrten genug von Solchen, welche durch ihre Werke verrathen, wie eine tiefe Begierde nach dem Vornehmen hin sie treibt: aber gerade dies Bedürfniss nach dem Vornehmen ist von Grund aus verschieden von den Bedürfnissen der vornehmen Seele selbst, und geradezu das beredte und gefährliche Merkmal ihres Mangels. Es sind nicht die Werke, es ist der Glaube, der hier entscheidet, der hier die Rangordnung feststellt, um eine alte religiöse Formel in einem neuen und tieferen Verstande wieder aufzunehmen: irgend eine Grundgewissheit, welche eine vornehme Seele über sich selbst hat, Etwas, das sich nicht suchen, nicht finden und vielleicht auch nicht verlieren lässt. Die vornehme Seele hat Ehrfurcht vor sich.

    --Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 287.

"The Death of God and the Death of Morality"

The final version is now on-line at The Monist, for those who might be interested.  (This is part of a special issue of The Monist devoted to Nietzsche.)

Moral psychology with Nietzsche, at the LARB

Yesterday Plato's moral psychology, today it's my turn to talk to Andy Fitch at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Exhibit on Nietzsche's influence on art...

...at the National Gallery of Canada.

(Thanks to Andrew Sneddon for the pointer.)

Sue Prideaux's biography of Nietzsche

I review it in the current Times Literary Supplement, although most of it is behind their paywall.  Short version:  she's a good, lively and entertaining writer, but doesn't understand much about his philosophical work.  As I write at the end: 

I have studied Nietzsche for more than three decades, and I very much enjoyed this biography, but it is not for those wanting to learn something about the philosophy. Prideaux’s discussions of his ideas are, at best, superficial, at worst, wrong.  Readers who know a lot about Nietzsche, or simply enjoy the juicy soap opera of the lives of great thinkers, will find this book appealing. The former can draw sounder connections between the life and the ideas than Prideaux, while the latter can perhaps take solace in the “human, all-too-human” (as Nietzsche would say) character of genius.

Robert Holub on Nietzsche

Strictly for those interested in Nietzsche.

"The Death of God and the Death of Morality"

The final manuscript version is here, for those who are interested.  It will appear in a special issue of The Monist later this year devoted to Nietzsche and being edited by Ken Gemes and Andrew Huddleston.

Conference on the work of Bernard Williams at Lund this June

I'll be talking about Williams and Nietzsche, at what is shaping up to be a very interesting conference:  further program information is here (including about how to register, for free).

International Society for Nietzsche Studies at Brown May 31-June 1: less than a week to submit a paper!

Details on the CFP here.

"The Truth is Terrible," my on-line essay on Nietzsche, was the most-read article...

...at the TLS on-line for 2018.  A pleasant surprise--thanks to many here who no doubt were among those who read it.

(Thanks to Bill Edmundson for the pointer.)

Philosophy and cognitive science catch up with Nietzsche, part 242

Philosopher Peter Carruthers explains that "conscious thought is an illusion," as that German fellow knew.

"The Truth is Terrible" (Nietzsche on the aesthetic "justification" of existence)

This paper, which has been making the rounds for quite awhile is finally out in the fall issue of Journal of Nietzsche Studies, for those interested. 

BU's Paul Katsafanas interviewed...

...at 3AM.  An interesting interview; I agree with some things he says, disagree pretty strongly with some others.

'Moral Psychology with Nietzsche'

Coming this March!

Call for Papers for the 4th Annual Meeting of the International Society of Nietzsche Studies at Brown University in 2019

MOVING TO FRONT FROM JULY 3

The CFP for the next meeting of ISNS is now on-line.  We will be able to cover travel and lodging for speakers whose papers are accepted for presentation (accepted papers will presumptively appear in the annual issue of Inquiry devoted to ISNS papers).  Please note the word limits!  (We'll review papers a bit longer, but they may need to be cut for publication purposes.)  The majority of papers selected during the CFP process have been written by PhD students.

The 4th annual meeting of ISNS will be hosted by Brown University on May 31 and June 1, 2019, thanks to the good efforts of Professor Bernard Reginster.  Confirmed invited speakers are  Taylor Carman (Barnard/Columbia), Beatrice Han-Pile (Essex), and Scott Jenkins (Kansas).  We expect to select two or three additional speakers based on the CFP.

Where to go to study Nietzsche, 2018 edition

Here.

Straussians are incapable of reading Nietzsche...

...and this review by philosopher and classical scholar Joel Mann (St. Norbert) of a recent Straussian book makes the point quite effectively.

'The Innocence of Becoming: Nietzsche Against Guilt' now published on-line...

...here, as part of the annual  ISNS issue of Inquiry.

'The Innocence of Becoming: Nietzsche Against Guilt'

The final version of this paper that has evolved over the last five years or so, for those who might be interested.  The abstract:

I offer an interpretation of Nietzsche’s striking idea of “the innocence of becoming” (die Unschuld des Werdens), and a partial defense of its import, namely, that no one is ever morally responsible or guilty for what they do and that many of the so-called “reactive attitudes” are misplaced. I focus primarily, though not exclusively, on the arguments as set out in Twilight of the Idols. First, there is Nietzsche’s hypothesis, partly psychological and partly historical or anthropological, that the ideas of “free” action or free will, and of responsibility for actions freely chosen or willed, were introduced primarily in order to justify punishment (“[m]en were considered ‘free’ so that they might be judged and punished”). Call this the Genetic Thesis about Free Will. Second, there is Nietzsche’s claim that the moral psychology, or “psychology of the will” as he calls it, that underlies this picture is, in fact, false — that, in fact, it is not true that every action is willed or that it reflects a purpose or that it originates in consciousness. Call these, in aggregate, the Descriptive Thesis about the Will. (Here I draw on earlier work.) Finally, there is articulation of a programmatic agenda, namely, to restore the “innocence of becoming” by getting rid of guilt and punishment based on guilt — not primarily because ascriptions of guilt and responsibility are false (though they are), but because a world understood as “innocent,” one understood in terms of “natural” cause and effect, is a better world in which to live. I focus in particular on a reactive attitude often ignored by philosophers, but of crucial importance for Nietzsche, namely, revenge. I aim to explain and defend Zarathustra’s recommendation: “Enemy’ you shall say, but not villain; sick you shall say, but not scoundrel; fool you shall say, but not sinner.” Nietzsche’s views are contrasted with those of important modern writers on these topics, especially P.F. Strawson and Derk Pereboom.

'Disagreement, Anti-Realism about Reasons, Inference to the Best Explanation'

A new draft paper on-line at SSRN; the abstract:

I revisit, refine and defend an inference to the best explanation (IBE) argument for anti-realism about reasons for acting based on the history of intractable disagreement in moral philosophy. The four key premises of the argument are: 1. If there were objective reasons for action, epistemically-well-situated observers would eventually converge upon them after two thousand years; 2. Contemporary philosophers, as the beneficiaries of two thousand years of philosophy, are epistemically well-situated observers; 3. Contemporary philosophers have not converged upon reasons for action; 4. Conclusion: there are no objective reasons for action (IBE from the first three premises). The key premises of the IBE are (1) sentimentalism; (2) non-cognitivism about basic affects; and (3) philosophical arguments for what our reasons for action are always involve a premise that depends on a basic intuitive moral judgment (that can be explained in terms of a basic non-cognitive affect). All these premises are explored in detail, and various objections addressed.

 Comments welcome from those who work on these issues; this version will be presented at a conference in Rome in September, and I won't undertake revisions until after that.

Self-help Nietzsche?

This is not a side of Nietzsche I typically discuss, but I had fun talking about it with British journalist Ben Wilson; it turned into a bit of a free-ranging discussion about Nietzsche beyond the traditional self-improvement genre.

"Nietzsche's Moral Psychology" for the Oxford Handbook

I've posted the penultimate draft of the essay for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology being edited by John Doris (Wash U/St. Louis) and Manuel Vargas (UC San Diego); it is a kind of precis of my forthcoming Moral Psychology with Nietzsche that OUP will publish in 2019 (that book both offers a reading of Nietzsche's moral psychology and a sustained philosophcial and empirical defense of it).

'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.)

Social science catching up with Nietzsche, part 127: the case of aesthetic pleasure

This; and for an explanation of Nietzsche's view, see this.

"The Truth is Terrible," (super) penultimate version on-line

This is my attempt to make sense of Nietzsche's idea that it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence is "justified."   This is the final version, except perhaps for some minor style editing, and will appear in Journal of Nietzsche Studies this fall.  This version is citable.  It will still also appear in  volume of essays that Nietzsche Daniel Came (Lincoln) is editing, but it will be out this fall in JNS.

8th Annual Bonn Summer School in Classical German Philosophy now taking applications

The topic will be "The Issue of Naturalism in Classical German Philosophy."  The primary instructors are Michael Forster and Markus Gabriel.  I'll be giving one of the keynote addresses on Nietzsche's naturalism.  Other keynote lecturers will include Sebastian Gardner (UCL), Yitzhak Melamed (Johns Hopkins), and Andrea Kern (Leipzig), among others.

Warwick's Keith Ansell-Pearson interviewed...

...at 3AM.  I confess I'm not a big fan of Ansell-Pearson's Nietzsche work, but he says a couple of things in this interview that seem to me sensible (e.g., his quip about Heidegger's' reading of Nietzsche:  "I find his reading both bombastic and perverse, and it shows a flagrant disregard for Nietzsche’s published texts.")  The claim about Nietzsche being Epicurean is far-fetched, and he exaggerates wildly the neglect of Daybreak (or Dawn as he calls it, either translation is fine).

Jacobin ought to find contributors (or at least editors) who know something about Nietzsche...

...before hosting garbage like this.  Why anyone would bother to analyze Jordan Peterson's "ideas" is already beyond me, but Harrison Fluss, the author, apparently has as superficial a knowledge of Nietzsche as Peterson has of everything.  Fluss, alas, turns out to be a Stony Brook PhD.  I will assume, charitably, that he didn't really study Nietzsche there; if he did, Stony Brook should revoke the doctorate!

(Thanks to David Auerbach for the pointer.)

(Almost) 10 books and/or articles on Nietzsche you should have read in the last 10 years

At my Nietzsche blog.

Thus spoke Goethe

From a review of a recent biography:

He alarmed people as much as he charmed them, not only by his impatience, his sudden flare-ups, and his unpredictable antics, but by his foul language. In moments of exasperation he would denounce as a shithead any of the great men who had assembled at Weimar—Wieland, Herder, Schiller. The best-remembered line from his first play, Götz von Berlichingen, is the robber baron Götz shouting through the window to the emperor’s messenger: “Tell his Imperial Majesty that he can lick my arse”—otherwise known as the Swabian salute.

(Be forewarned, the author of the review clearly does not like Goethe, and it goes off the rails at the end, having the idiotic audacity to associate Goethe with the Holocaust.)

Thus spoke Nietzsche: "The criminal of criminals is consequently the philosopher"

In the twilight of his sanity, seething with frustration at being so widely ignored, Nietzsche wrote the rhetorically overwrought The Anti-Christ, the one work with the smell of madness about it at many places (he seems to have recovered a bit later that fall of 1888 when he wrote the more ingenious and ironic Ecce Homo).  The book concludes with Nietzsche's proclamation of the "Law Against Christianity," which includes six propositions, of which this is the second:

Any participation in church services is an attack on public morality.  One should be harsher with Protestants than with Catholics, harsher with liberal Protestants than with orthodox ones.  The criminality of being Christian increases with one's proxmity to science.  The criminal of criminals is consequently the philosopher.

"Science" is of course Wissenschaft, so no connotation of natural science, but it does mean a discipline that purports to produce knowledge.

 

 

 

2017 in review: articles posted on SSRN

Over the course of the year, I posted the following articles on SSRN:

"Legal Positivism about the Artifact Law:  A Retrospective Assessment"

"The Roles of Judges in Democracies:  A Realistic View"

"Justifying Academic Freedom:  Mill and Marcuse Revisited"

"Nietzsche and Aestheticism" (originally published in 1992, my first peer-refereed publication)

"Knowledge and Affect:  Perspectivism Revisited"

"Introduction:  Nietzsche's Naturalistic Moral Psychology"

"Why Academic Freedom?"

Better not to be born

Profile of a nihilist, less interesting than Schopenhauer.  He should also read some Nietzsche!

On guilt, shame, and bourgeois child-rearing..

...at The New York Times of course.  They all need to read more Nietzsche.

Psychology catches up with Nietzsche, part 242: consciousness is superficial to the mind's activities

Here; an excerpt:

Most experts think that consciousness can be divided into two parts: the experience of consciousness (or personal awareness), and the contents of consciousness, which include things such as thoughts, beliefs, sensations, perceptions, intentions, memories and emotions.

It’s easy to assume that these contents of consciousness are somehow chosen, caused or controlled by our personal awareness – after all, thoughts don’t exist until until we think them. But in a new research paper in Frontiers of Psychology, we argue that this is a mistake.

We suggest that our personal awareness does not create, cause or choose our beliefs, feelings or perceptions. Instead, the contents of consciousness are generated “behind the scenes” by fast, efficient, non-conscious systems in our brains. All this happens without any interference from our personal awareness, which sits passively in the passenger seat while these processes occur.

Put simply, we don’t consciously choose our thoughts or our feelings – we become aware of them.

(Thanks to Ivan Kelly for the pointer.)